I am writing a VSTO add-inn to Word (and Outlook as well). I want to emphasize certain parts of the text (detected errors). As far as I know, there is no API for this kind of emphasizing in Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word or other libraries.
But Grammarly (www.grammarly.com) has found a way to do it:
Does anyone know how you can do it the same way?
I believe that the best way to do this would be to place the desired text into a Range and then apply the following formatting:
myRange.Font.Underline = Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.WdUnderline.wdUnderlineThick;
myRange.Font.UnderlineColor = Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.WdColor.wdColorRed;
How This Would Work With Grammerly
As previously pointed out in the comments for the question, the only way to add the emphasis is to change the document temporarily, which is what Grammerly seems to do in a very smart way. Grammerly only works when one clicks the Open Grammerly button on the Grammerly ribbon. If you do a simple experiment, you may be able to observe how Grammerly controls its temporary changes.
First create an unsaved document with some misspelled words that show the wavy red line. Then click the Open Grammerly button. Notice that the add-in turns off spell checking and replaces it with its own web-triggered markings that are generated in the document and similar to what is generated by the code above. Then save the document. If you look carefully, you will see a small blink wherein the red thick underlines disappear for a brief moment. That is the Document.BeforeSave event removing their markings before saving the document. By relying on user actions, Grammerly controls at what points in time the markings appear. It then uses code and events to make sure the markings are not saved with the document or interfere with other operations.
Some of the events you may want to look at are the:
Document.BeforeSave Event
Document.BeforePrint Event
Document.BeforeClose Event
Related
I am creating a Libreoffice Impress (powerpoint) set of slides and the one thing I can't figure out is notes formatting. The core issue is that I can format the notes, but when I start the slideshow, all of the formatting is removed and I end up with a difficult to read text blob wherein only newlines are preserved.
Is there any way to carry over the notes formatting into the notes display mode during a slideshow? I've searched for an answer to this and have found nothing so I feel like I'm missing something really simple.
If you're notes are unreadable because line spacing does not carry forward you may want to add spaces between the notes that you want separated, this should make them easier to read.
Notes formatting is useful for printing or exporting as PDF. During the presentation, formatting is not shown. However the font size can be adjusted by using the zoom controls. According to https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/images/8/86/IG4208-SlidesNotesHandouts.pdf:
Notes provide a convenient way to create reminders or add extra
information to slides in a presentation. Notes are not displayed
during a slide show. However, using dual displays, you can display any
notes on the second display as a presentation cue. You can also print
the notes and use them as handouts.
If the notes are unreadable without formatting, then perhaps it would help to enter more newlines. If you have so many notes for one slide that they become a "difficult to read text blob", then maybe you need to simplify the notes.
Also see https://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Presenter_Screen.
I have a data entry form. Its properly tab indexed etc. and there are three dropdown menus which automatically unfurl with the on enter event.
No matter how much advice i give to users about using the tab key and keboard and checking what they just input.
they still insist on using the mouse to select values from the dropdown menus
the problem is that in their haste they often make mistakes as a result of using the mouse.
I would like to be able to force users to input into these fields using the keyboard.
the drop down is neccessary for users see the appropriate values for the field because the values will vary based on previous selections.
I have already tried experimenting with onclick events but to no avail.
Is there a way I can do this?
i am using access 2007 many of the users have access 2003.
Based on your comments, I would take one of two different approaches.
If your users are really comfortable with the codes AND know which ones they should use based on their previous selections, then just use text boxes instead of combo boxes. You can still put some validation code in either the Form_BeforeUpdate event or the individual control's _BeforeUpdate event.
If the users are not that comfortable, then I would suggest you have the first field in the combo boxes be the description of the code, not the code itself. So instead of choosing from 101, 102, 103 they are instead choosing from "Small", "Medium", "Large" or whatever those codes actually apply to. If you still wanted to display the codes themselves, you could do that with a separate disabled text box.
Now to answer your actual question. For the record, I highly recommend against using this approach. The simplest way I can thing of to prevent your users from using the mouse to select the combo box, would be to add a Transparent button covering the combo box.
To do this, draw a regular command button over the combo. Set Transparent = Yes, Visible = Yes, Enabled = Yes, Tab Stop = No.
When users click on the combo now, they will actually be clicking on the Transparent button and nothing will happen. The ONLY way they will be able to get into the control is by tabbing from a neighboring control or using a hotkey (via '&' in attached label).
Once they enter the control via Tab and your code forces a dropdown, they will still be able to choose an option using the mouse. But by forcing them to use the keyboard initially, it will make it much more likely that they just stick with the keyboard.
Again--I can't stress this enough--I think this is a terrible, horrible, no-good idea. Please don't use this approach. But you asked a technical question and this site is all about giving technical answers, so there you go...
We are trying to write a training manual application for the iPhone. On the top half of the screen is a diagram of a car engine, on the bottom half is some text. At the user repeatedly hits a "next" button, we highlight different parts of the engine, and in concert we highlight different parts of the descriptive text below.
We basically want "living text" in the text half, with the illustration following along on top to where the reader is in the text. What we'd like from the text is 1. user can scroll it using their thumb so possibly a UIScrollView 2. the software can explicitly drive a scroll to any part of the text (when they hit the "next" button). 3. the words in the text are interspersed with hotlinks e.g. "this is the camshaft... this is the piston..." and the user should be able to click on any of the keywords like camshaft, piston, and have the diagram highlight that. (The problem is not highlighting the diagram, its capturing the click). The text would have 300~400 buttons/links/keywords and about 600 words of text.
Since this is fairly similar to using a web browser, we tried using Apple's version of webkit using a UIWebView and handleOpenURL to register a service back to the app itself. But Webkit for internal links a popup comes up asking permission to access that link. Every single the user wants to go to a link (in our case just an internal event that we'd intercept so that we can highlight e.g. the camshaft). Tried to intercept the event from the HTML view, but that didn't work.
It seems like the best we can do is to abandon scrolling text, and make the text part more like flash cards or a power point presentation, breaking the text into custom UIViewCells with buttons inside a UIScrollView. However, this would impose an annoying constraint on the author that they would have to write everything to fit in the UIViewCells, sort of chunky.
Any ideas would be appreciated.
This is definitely something you can use a UIWebView for. Don't use handleOpenURL, rather, set your viewController as the webview's delegate, and override -webView:shouldStartLoadWithRequest:navigationType:. When this gets called, check the request, and pull out your link data from there.
It would probably be easier to implement that completely in JavaScript in the document you load in a UIWebView. You would have to use JavaScript (i.e. [UIWebView stringbyevaluatingjavascriptfromstring:]) anyway to achieve things like scrolling to a certain position.
Does anyone know of a GWT widget that works like a spelling suggestor?
Ideally it would be similar to this: http://www.polishmywriting.com/
I need a click-triggered popup on user generated text so that I can suggest replacements (I am not building a spell-checker, but something similar). I also really like the way the polishmywriting menu is set up (when you click on an underlined word).
Is there a widget that would allow me to make something similar?
Basically I'm trying to clone the little popups used by spellchecking in Gmail and polishmywriting.
If not, what would be my first step to make it?
Thanks for your time and answers,
DTrejo
Have you had any luck yet? I know it's been quite a lot of time, but found this just now.
It is a very specific widget, so maybe you won't be able to find exactly what you are looking for. In that case, making one from scratch might prove as a challenge.
The first thing you will notice is that a regular gwt TextArea won't do the job of holding the text. You will need something more flexible to dynamically put clickable labels in the text itself.
TinyMCE is a platform independent web based Javascript HTML WYSIWYG editor control, released as Open Source.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TinyMCE
There is also a gwt wrapper available, so you might find that useful:
http://code.google.com/p/tinymce-gwt/
If you check the polishmywriting editor after the spell checking markup is displayed, you will notice it is not a TextArea. The text is a series of paragraphs and the labeled parts are span elements. This are the elements you can easily access with gwt and put some click handlers there to open the popup.
And for the popups, it shouldn't be difficult. Use a standard gwt PopupPanel. The popup panel can be displayed in a relative position to other elements displayed on the page:
popup.showRelativeTo(otherElement);
If you did find something useful in the mean time, feel free to share.
Does anyone have any examples or resources where i might find information on scrolling text which is too long to display in a button control? I'm thinking something along these lines.
Display as much text will fit within the current rect with a '...' at the end to signify overflow.
Pause for say 1 second then slowly scroll the text to the right edge displaying the right part of the string.
Display as much text will fit within the current rect with a '...' at the beginning to signify overflow.
Start the whole thing over in reverse.
Is there an easy way to do this using the "core" or built in "animation" frameworks on a certain mobile device?
[edit]
Iwanted to add some more details as i think people are more focused on wether or not what i'm trying to accomplish is appropriate. The button is for the answers on a trivia game. It does not perform any speciffic UI function but is for displaying the answer. Apple themselves is doing this in their iQuiz trivia game on the iPod Nano and i think its a pretty elegant solution to answers that are longer than the width of my button.
In case its the '...' that is the difficult part of this. Lets say i removed this requirement. Could i have the label for the button be full sized but clipped to the client rect of the button and use some animation methods to scroll it within the clipping rect? This would give me almost the same effect minus the ellipses.
Here's an idea: instead of ellipses (...), use a gradient on each side, so the extra text fades away into the background color. Then you could do this with three CALayers: one for the text and two for fade effect.
The fade masks would just be rectangles with a gradient that goes from transparent to the background color. They should be positioned above the text layer. The text would be drawn on the text layer, and then you just animate it sliding back and forth in the manner you describe. You can create a CGPath object describing the path and add it to a CAKeyframeAnimation object which you add to the text layer.
As for whether you think this is "easy" depends on how well you know Core Animation, but I think once you learn the API you'll find this isn't too bad and would be worth the trouble.
Without wishing to be obtuse, maybe you should rethink your problem. A button should have a clear and predictable function. It's not a place to store and display text. Perhaps you could have a description show on screen with a nice standard button below?
Update with source code example:
Here is some ready to use source code example (actually a full zipped Xcode project with image and nib files and some source code), not for the iPhone, not using Core Animation, just using a couple of simple NSImages and a NSImageView. It is just a cheap hack, it does not implement the full functionality you requested (sorry, but I don't feel like writing your source code for you :-P), horrible code layout (hey, I just hacked this together within a couple of minutes, so you can't expect any better ;-)) and it's just a demonstration how this can be done. It can be done with Core Animation, too, but this approach is simpler. Composing the button animation into a NSImageView is not as nice as subclassing a NSView and directly paint to its context, but it's much simpler (I just wanted to hack together the simplest solution possible). It will also not scroll back once it scrolled all the way to the right. Therefor you just need another method to scroll back and start another NSTimer that fires 2 seconds after you drew the dots to the left.
Just open the project in Xcode and hit run, that's all there is to do. Then have a look at the source code. It's really not that complicated (however, you may have to reformat it first, the layout sucks).
Update because of comment to my answer:
If you don't use Apple UI elements at all, I fail to see the problem. In that case your button is not even a button, it's just a clickable View (NSView if you use Cocoa). You can just sub-class NSView as MyAnswerView and overwrite the paint method to paint into the view whatever you wish. Multiline text, scrolling text, 3D text animated, it's completely up to your imagination.
Here's an example, showing how someone subclassed NSView to create a complete custom control that does not exist by default. The control looks like this:
See the funny thing in the upper left corner? That is a control. Here's how it works:
I hate to say that, as it is no answer to your question, but "Don't do that!". Apple has guidelines how to implement a user interface. While you are free to ignore them, Apple users are used to have UIs following these guidelines and not following them will create applications that Apple users find ugly and little appealing.
Here are Apple's Human Interface Guidelines
Let me quote from there
Push Button Contents and Labeling
A push button always contains text, it
does not contain an image. If you need
to display an icon or other image on a
button, use instead a bevel button,
described in “Bevel Buttons.”
The label on a push button should be a
verb or verb phrase that describes the
action it performs—Save, Close, Print,
Delete, Change Password, and so on. If
a push button acts on a single
setting, label the button as
specifically as possible; “Choose
Picture…,” for example, is more
helpful than “Choose…” Because buttons
initiate an immediate action, it
shouldn’t be necessary to use “now”
(Scan Now, for example) in the label.
Push button labels should have
title-style capitalization, as
described in “Capitalization of
Interface Element Labels and Text.” If
the push button immediately opens
another window, dialog, or application
to perform its action, you can use an
ellipsis in the label. For example,
Mail preferences displays a push
button that includes an ellipsis
because it opens .Mac system
preferences, as shown in Figure 15-8.
Buttons should contain a single verb or a verb phrase, not answers to trivia game! If you have between 2 and 5 answers, you should use Radio Buttons to have the user select the answer and an OK button to have the user accept the answer. For more than 5 answers, you should consider a Pop-up Selector instead according to guidelines, though I guess that would be rather ugly in this case.
You could consider using a table with just one column, one row per answer and each cell being multiline if the answer is very long and needs to break. So the user selects a table row by clicking on it, which highlights the table cell and then clicks on an OK button to finish. Alternatively, you can directly continue, as soon as the user selects any table cell (but that way you take the user any chance to correct an accidental click). On the other hand, tables with multiline cells are rather rare on MacOS X. The iPhone uses some, but usually with very little text (at most two lines).
Pretty sure you can't do that using the standard API, certainly not with UILineBreakMode. In addition, the style guide says that an ellipsis indicates that the button when pressed will ask you for more information -for example Open File... will ask for the name of a file. Your proposed use of ellipsis violates this guideline.
You'd need some custom logic to implement the behaviour you describe, but I don't think it's the way to go anyway.
This is not a very good UI practice, but if you still want to do it, your best bet is to do so via a clickable div styled to look like a button.
Set the width of the div to an explicit value, and its overflow to hidden, then use a script executing on an interval to adjust the scrollLeft property of this div.