I'm trying to re-create a paper form that we have at our organization by converting it to a contribution page. Does anyone know how to put a character limit on a text box? There's a hard limit on what this contribution gets (45 characters per line on two lines - for an engraving).
Assuming this is a custom form on a TNEW contribution page, the answer is no, at least not easily. Custom forms saved to a CSI only have a limit on the total number of characters that can be saved to the CSI across all fields, which is 4000. This limit is not imposed on the user at the point of entry.
One approach that may be workable depending on how much technical complexity you are willing to take on would be to add some JavaScript to your TNEW template which affects the functionality of this particular form, by imposing the 45-character limit on the user and providing helpful indicators when they attempt to enter too many characters. You would probably want to structure your form with separate fields for line 1 and line 2 so that the character limit can be imposed on each line independently.
Implementing this kind of feature is not straightforward, and typically requires a decent amount of web programming skill and familiarity with the TNEW frontend. The other risk is that these kinds of changes are technically unsupported by TNEW, so there is no guarantee that TNEW won't release a change that breaks your customization at an indeterminate point in the future. All that said, these types of customizations are not entirely uncommon within the Tessitura ecosystem.
Thank you! I had a feeling this was going to be the case. We're still on out-of-the-box TNEW template, so maybe I'll add this to our wishlist when we approach redesigning it.