best way to customize the size/font/placement of items on a prompt page

[paulmaric]

On Cognos Connection 8.4, the prompt pages tend to have a lot of whitespace, and I need to find the best way to customize the widgets and placement to make it more compact and 'formlike'.  Without using mashup services to create a distinct interface, what techniques have others done to control the look, size, placement, font, color, etc of a prompt page?  I also want to move things around a bit, such as the range prompt that's a stacked 4 field item that includes low value, entry field, high value, entry field.  It's too tall for my needs, so I want to make the fields horizontal and smaller.  Thanks.

[whastings]

I am not sure if this is what you are looking for, but we have created a standardized prompt page using a table. When we insert the table into the prompt page, we uncheck the "Maximize Width" check box so the cells will collapse around the largest value...good for alignment. You can then control fonts, colors, etc. for each cell or for the whole table.

Typically, the table is two columns with the left column being the placeholder for the text or prompt label, and the right column for the prompts themselves. You could increase the number of columns if you want prompts side by side, but for our purposes, we wanted the prompts in a single column so the user only has to scroll up or down and not sideways. We also gave the "text" column a background color matching our primary corporate color.

All of our report authors follow this standard.