System Font and Unicode characters

F&M supports a system font which provides the character representations used within any forms, gadgets and menus which you define. This system font has variable width characters (referred to as VarChars), so different characters may have different widths. A notional character width for the font is also supported. This is a sort of average width (usually the width of upper-case X), and provides a rough guide to the width of a text string as (number of characters X notional width).

The recommended system font also supports many of the World's character sets, so forms can be designed to use non-English characters, and even to mix different languages on the same form. In order to achieve this PML and F&M now use the Unicode standard as their internal character format.