Formatting a Lotus Notes Document - Part 1

There are a few tricks that I use the most when designing a Lotus Notes document template. One of them is making sure that text is readable. I've been told that Lotus Notes developers have come a long way and that the concepts of design already old in web development, have also been brought into Lotus Notes and that no one does things like this anymore. No, they do. I've seen it and I have proof.

There is a a simple design rule I try to implement at all times.

Use a table of 6.5 width to hold content


If you can help it, never use Fit to Margins. It looks terrible and makes forms harder to read. There is a reason Readability, book readers, tablets, newspapers and other forms of content distribution don't display text across the full width of a page. Long and wide areas of text becomes unreadable. The human eye doesn't track well across 14 inches of text on the same line, a prospect which grows increasingly difficult as length increases.

By keeping content inside a Fixed width table, you are staying in control of your content. You are determining where the user should move next and you are subtly guiding the flow of the form.

As software developers, we are increasingly required to not only understand how to develop the coding part of software, but to understand how to influence human interaction through a software interface.