Antialiasing gone rogue? (1 Viewer)

[David R]

This form used to work fine under 2003... it's still an .mdb, but in 2007/2010 it looks like hell. I haven't bothered to try to upscale it yet, but a search of the forum yielded nothing... thoughts?

 

[RuralGuy]

Try unchecking:
File>Options>Current Database>Use Windows-themed Controls on Forms

 

[David R]

Good theory, but no visible change.

 

[Pat Hartman]

There is no easy fix for this. If you convert the database to an .accdb, you can switch to themes but even that will be a pain. You can do it a form at a time or you can write code to modify the various form properties.

Themes are great for creating new forms but you can't impose them on existing forms - Maybe Luke Chung of FMSINC will see this and create a new tool for us. When you have an old form in a new database, Access assumes that the control properties were customized by you and that's the way you want them. To make the form follow a theme, you need to change all the font and color properties to "theme" values. So your code would need to change #FFFFFF to Text 1, Lighter 80% for example. I would probably not attempt to customize the conversion and just go with something more generic. Like pick a font and apply it across the board. Then pick a font size. Then pick a color for labels, data, and backgrounds. You'll need to get rid of background images also if you used them That will sort of standardize them and you can tweak them one at a time.

 

[David R]

I am perfectly happy to redeploy it as a .accdb if that will solve this. This is really the only form that's acting that way, but then again it's the only form built on such a narrow font (information density is at a premium for this part of the DB). Pretty much everything else has Arial.

The odd part is that my end users do not report the same visibility problem, so I keep thinking it's something about my machine (or that they don't even realize it's so bad). But I just had a clean reimaging and it's still there...