Changing Color of a font string?

Guides UI and Macro
1

Noob question #47:

I have an addon that incorporates checkboxes. They work just fine. But now I want to change the text color of their tooltip and prompt strings to GameFontNormal. More generally, I would really like to learn more about the various font methods and how and when to use them.

Anyway, here’s my code:

local box = CreateFrame("CheckButton", 
                        "OPTIONS_damageBtn", 
                         f, 
                         "ChatConfigCheckButtonTemplate")

box:SetPoint("TOPLEFT", xPos, yPos )

local toolTipText = "Report threat generated by each party member."
local promptText = "Threat metrics by party member?"

box.tooltip = toolTipText
_G[box:GetName().."Text"]:SetText( promptText )
local reportDamageDetails = false
    box:SetChecked( reportDamageDetails )
    ...

What I would like to do is change the color of 'toolTipText" and “promptText” from white to GameFontNormal. I can do what I want to do using escape sequences, but I need to learn how to use the APIs. To this end, I’ve been experimenting with the various font methods but am not quite sure of what I’m doing.

I would really appreciate any advice.

Thanks,

2

https://wow.gamepedia.com/API_FontString_SetTextColor

https://wow.gamepedia.com/UI_escape_sequences

Because the template specifies that the fontstring has a parentKey of “Text” you can just use:

box.Text:SetText(...)

Instead of querying the global table.

Edit: You could also:

box.Text:SetFontObject(GameFontNormal)

or
box.Text:SetTextColor(GameFontNormal:GetTextColor())

The first will change all the attributes (font, size, colour etc.), the second will inherit just the colour