In almost any development environment, you have static text elements—the elements that won't change for one reason or the other. Common uses of static text elements are as field identifiers in online web forms, identification of what some piece of data is, instruction for how to use an application, on screen prompts, and titles. Reporting is no exception to this rule. In reporting, one can see this type of static text content used as column headers for listings, report titles, and as footer information such as copyright lines. BIRT provides this in the form of Labels. The following is the icon used on the development palette for the Label.
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In the previous chapter, we saw Labels used as the column headers in our employee listing report, although we didn't have to create them explicitly. We got to see one of the properties for Labels when we changed it and made it bold. This illustrated one of the most common properties of the Label component—font information. This will be the most...