As of KNIME 4.7, the “Text Output Widget” still does not support the modification of text visualization through CSS style sheets within the component’s “improved” interactive view (that being the improvements made to a widget’s user interface in KNIME 4.2).
Below is a simple example – I simply want to make the text output red via the “CSS Editor” node:
I provide it with the following CSS:
.knime-qf-title {
color: red;
}
.knime-qf-text {
color: red;
}
And set this to the “customCSS” flow variable of the “Text Output Widget”.
However, within the component view, the color changes are not applied:
In checking a previous post which had the exact same issue (see Can't get custom CSS to work in Text Output Widget), the proposed “solution” was to enable the “use legacy mode” within the “Composite View Layout” panel:
However, the “solution” to “use legacy mode” is not satisfactory whatsoever.
While utilizing legacy mode does indeed have the “Text Output Widget” display the desired color, it will also revert all the other widgets within the view to their less desirable “legacy” counterparts.
In my very simple example, you will note that while the text is now in red, the string field doesn’t extend across the screen anymore due to it now being the “legacy” version:
If I only had a string field with the text, I may be able to live with it, but in my production dashboard it reverts all the sliders and selectors to their less polished versions. This is exacerbated by the fact that I several “pages” (i.e., separate components) within my dashboard you click through, so for one page to have “legacy” versions of widgets and other pages have “modern” versions of widgets will create an inconsistent user experience.
Yes, I can be clever and encase each individual “Text Output Widget” within their very own component, then set each one of those components to use the “legacy” version, and finally set those components within a larger component that does NOT use the “legacy” version so other widgets can still leverage the “improved” versions within the same view… but that’s simply annoying to nest components like that repeatedly.
Are there any plans to update the “modern” interface to support these CSS fields?
This has been a consistent pain point for us in the development of dashboards and find it frustrating that we have to consistently swap between “legacy” and “modern” views to get different benefits from each.
Thanks! 
