Fun with Webdings

[Lynn]

Hi all,
Anyone who's done dashboard-style reporting probably understands how images and icons, as part of a good design, can really improve visual appeal and usability.

Attached is something I put together for people I deal with to help them consider design ideas and to get more specific with requirements requests. Of course graphics people are involved for the really high-end stuff, but using the Webdings font with plain old text items and layout calculations can provide a lot of choices that can be implemented quickly and without any graphic designer costs involved.

I don't know if others might have different font installations but we are on 10.2.2 and nothing special was done with regard to fonts as far as I know. I do find that a few don't turn up on PDF output but my results with regular HTML reports and Active Reports are pretty decent.

Attached is a report spec against one of the GO sales packages that illustrates some ideas for use on the first tab. There are so many icons and ways to incorporate into your design that this is really just the tip of the iceberg. Oh, and capital M in Webdings looks kind of like an iceberg. Or a mountain.

The second tab shows all the icons you can get with the regular printable ASCII character set. For these you just type the appropriate key on the keyboard and set the font to Webdings, sized as you like.

Further down on the second tab you can see additional icons that come from the extended ASCII character set. For these you need to use a layout calculation with a mapNumberToLetter function and also set it to Webdings font. The report spec explains more. I found on our install that extended ASCII character codes 128 through 159 don't turn up when run to PDF. These are labelled 2 through 33 on the reference page.

Maybe someone else might find a use for these techniques. Happy designing!

Lynn

[MFGF]

Sounds like a fantastic idea! I think I must be missing something important, though. I'm just seeing regular old Ascii characters in your example report. I will dig a little further...

Cheers!

MF.

[BigChris]

The xml doesn't work for me unfortunately, but that might be because I'm on 10.2 Any chance you could attach a screenshot?

[Lynn]

Oh dear. Zero for two.  :(

Attached are screen shots of what it should look like. Maybe it has something to do with how fonts are installed locally or on the Cognos server, or perhaps both. Oh well. Sorry I have no idea how to address that. It works for everyone at my place.

[BigChris]

That's brilliant...I really like that. I like the geographical icons best, but I can see lots of uses for the others as well.

I haven't looked, but I'm sure there are lots of free resources on the web for icons that could be used as well. I think I might spend a lunch hour sometime pulling together a pallette that I can make use of in dashboards.

I'm also thinking of "flattening" a lot of my dashboards and taking out the graduations to give them a more modern look. Makes me realise that I need to keep coming back to dashboards to make sure they're as good as they can be...

[MFGF]

The xml doesn't work for me unfortunately, but that might be because I'm on 10.2 Any chance you could attach a screenshot?

Hi Chris,

You can probably get it to work - if you change the XML schema version in Lynn's report. Hers is 10.2.2, so the version is:

http://developer.cognos.com/schemas/report/12.0/

Check what your current version is and replace the 12.0 with that - you might then be able to get the report to load.

I'd be very interested to see if you can see the same Webdings characters as Lynn. I'm puzzling over why I can't, currently.

Cheers!

MF.

[MFGF]

Aha! That looks better!!

There is, in fact, nothing at all wrong with Lynn's report - just as you'd expect really. The issue was my browser. I was using Firefox, and not seeing any of the Webdings characters...



I tried Internet Explorer, and voila!



Out of curiosity I also tried Chrome. That worked too:



Fantastic technique, Lynn!!! I like it a lot!!! :)

Cheers!

MF.

[BigChris]

I'm sure you're right, but I think it would take a bit more work than that...at the top of the xml it's got

Code Select Expand

<report viewPagesAsTabs
and I don't think that will work in 10.2  But I can see from the xml what it's doing and Lynn's screenshot show the output, so I can definitely see the benefit :)

[Lynn]

Chris, Attached is a version without tabs that might work if you change the version as Muppet described.

Muppet, I'm so glad it was something relatively simple! I notice the money bag next to the profitability widget doesn't appear on Chrome as it does in IE. That is one of the extended ASCII characters and is also one of those that won't render on PDF for me. Some of the extended set turn up on PDF while others do not.

I also find they won't show up on iPad or iPhone in the IBM Cognos app if you use them in an active report, but of course an active report viewed in the (right) browser works fine.

[MFGF]

I notice the money bag next to the profitability widget doesn't appear on Chrome as it does in IE.

Might be because we use British Pounds as currency over here? That bag appears to be dollars. I wonder if my UK English Chrome install is simply ignoring it because it knows it's not real money? ;)

[Lynn]

Might be because we use British Pounds as currency over here? That bag appears to be dollars. I wonder if my UK English Chrome install is simply ignoring it because it knows it's not real money? ;)

Ha ha, funny muppet!

Reminds me of a conversation I overheard in Manchester last week on St. Patrick's Day. An Irish guy was commenting to his companions about Americans who claim to be Irish saying "it doesn't count." I'd like to see him visit an Irish bar in Boston and watch the reaction he gets from that comment!

[BigChris]

We have to make allowances for our colonial cousins...my thought when I saw that bag was that it should have "swag" written on it.

[Lynn]

We have to make allowances for our colonial cousins...my thought when I saw that bag was that it should have "swag" written on it.

Thank goodness for allowances!

[cognos-t]

Thanks for sharing Lynn. I really the idea and the given possibilities from using Webdings in reports. 

[bdbits]

Very creative Lynn. However there are some caveats as has been seen. Essentially, if your clients are all using IE on Windows it should be fine, otherwise success will vary.

   
• Fonts are local to the client running them, in other words they have to be locally available on the device viewing the report. This will be true for most (all?) of those running a traditional Windows OS. I am not too sure on others like iOS (Mac and iPhone), Android, or Linux. This may or may not be important to you.
• Even if the font is installed as part of the OS, Wingdings as I understand it lacks complete Unicode mapping. For very standards-compliant clients like Firefox and Chrome, this presents challenges and in some cases is just not going to work very well. It might be interesting to try this with Safari.
• This could also explain some of the problems you've seen viewing them in PDFs.
• Because the font rendering is dependent on the client, it may or may not work with all browsers. The biggest problem area would probably be phones and tablets.

[Lynn]

Thanks very much for that clarification! Caveat Emptor!