How to insert keyboard key graphic representations into your document? - libreoffice

I'm working on a document describing keyboard shortcuts in GNOME and want to make text better looking than: ALT + TAB. A common way seems to be like in this thread where the buttons appear to be within the text:
https://unix.stackexchange.com/q/465681
Is this possible in LibreOffice in a proper way, or is it just inserting images inline? That doesn't seem like it would work every well with changing font size, etc. later, so I was hoping for a better solution.

You could insert real push buttons that don't do anything by following steps 1 thru 6 outlined at https://help.libreoffice.org/Common/Inserting_and_Editing_Buttons. But that approach, as well as inserting inline images, would be awkward because you'd have to worry at least about sizing, anchoring, and wrapping of surrounding text.
The approach you appear to be trying to avoid seems much more palatable, so long as you're not looking to exactly duplicate to Stack Exchange look.
As an example to demonstrate that it's workable, I did the following by applying the same Character formatting settings to each key word. This involved changing font family and size, setting light gray highlighting, adding a gray border, and changing left and right border padding from 0.02 to 0.06...
To make things easy, the settings could all be done with a single button press by creating a macro that could be applied to selected text. And since the result is just formatted text, there are no sizing, anchoring, or text wrapping issues to worry about.
One other option, as an alternative to significant text formatting, is to acquire and use a keyboard font, such as that discussed at How is the Keyboard font automatically styled as keyboard-like keys for the letters in Alt, Shift, Ctrl, Esc, and Backspace?. That would only require changing to that font to type in key representations.

Related

Display larger indentation for files that are indented with just two spaces

I'm working on a project that is using 2 spaces as indentation.
I have a hard time reading code with such small indentation, so my question is:
Question: Can I make vscode show the two spaces as if they were wider (for example double the width)?
(I could of course solve it in a hackish way, by converting each file on checkout, and convert it back before i commit it, but that would be very tedious and error prone. I could also try to convince the project to convert the whole project to tabs, so that everyone can use their own preferred indentation. But I don't want to go into that discussion for every project I work on :) )
I have written the extension Indent Whitespace that decorates each space used in indentation with additional spaces (cursor will skip the decoration).
The decorated spaces are colored with a very transparent red.
With a setting you can change the number of spaces to add, default 1.
If you delete spaces with Delete it looks funny because the selection does not change, use the Arrow keys to update the decorations.
In a later version I will make the decoration color a setting, and also only update the decoration when the file changes (only important for large files, and fix the delete-update rendering).
I think you can't.
There is no such setting in VS Code. As of version 1.13, you can change the kerning, but this changes the spacing between all characters. You cannot do this only for a single character (or a set of characters).
The space width is a property of the font. Microsoft has a guideline that defines what is the ideal space size for a font. But this does not mean you cannot change it yourself when designing one. So I created a version of Roboto Mono which space character is 4x the original one.
This works on Notepad and MS Word, we can see the space is quite big. However, using the exact same font in VS Code, the space is still small, independently of the font being monospaced or not.
Illustration
Somehow, it looks like VS Code ignores space size in the font and decides by itself what is the best value.

Fillable Pdf multi-line, Allow rich text formatting in Acrobat Pro DC: but it ignores line spacing/leading set in More

I'm on Win10, using Acrobat Pro DC 2021.011... to edit and Reader DC (same version) to test.
From experience and from reading forums etc, forms in these apps are maddening... but I have not been able to find any discussion (or solutions) to the following behavior...
The form I'm building for other employees' use has a large edit text box set to Multi-line and Allow Rich Text Formatting. It is set to a default font, Calibri and size 50pt. For most situations this will work for them; provides 2-3 lines for a short product description. But occasionally they want a smaller font and more lines... They know how to get the ctrl+e properties bar. But in my testing of this alternative situation they'll need sometimes, I'm finding it's impossible to get the smaller font size and more lines to work. Here's my process.
tab into text box. Ctrl+E for properties bar.
before typing I set the font size to 24
then I type in my 4 lines of text
then I tab to my next form field...
and kaboom... the field I just filled...it's line height is so large it's pushed some of the content invisible. I assume this is coming from the field's default font size, 50
And if I try to adjust the line height, by selecting all the text and then choosing in More...>Form Field Text Properties>Paragraph>Line Spacing
If I set it to Single and click Close/click into another field I get the very large leading (presumably for 50pt font (same as pic above after point 5)
If I choose Exactly and set to point size slightly larger, click Close/out of field, I get another ridiculous result where the 2/3 line have the height I set, but the space between the 1 & 2 second line is way too much and the space between the last line and 3rd line is way too small...
before tabbing or clicking out of field to another field
Good lord.. what is that! 3 different leading values in the same field; just after applying 1 value to all lines, all text in the field...
It makes no sense... it doesn't look like it regards your input at all, and just comes up with it's own random leading... I've fiddled with Space before/after and combinations of Line Height and nothing comes close to what we need... At this point I'm convinced the Acrobat tools for a stylizing text in a multi-line, allow formatting text field are useless. I'd be better off with my employees they can't format anything, ever. Just type one line and hit Tab or Enter...
What is going on! I'm trying to make a simple fillable form for other employees to use, but this kind of behavior makes that impossible (It's enough of a stretch to teach them to use the ctrl+E and do some styling of their text but this is bonkers and completely unteachable... there's not rhyme or pattern to teach!)
Hope someone can help or has seen this behavior too.

How to add automatically expanding horizontal space in libreoffice (similar to say flex justify-content space-around)

I'm trying to achieve this effect:
|First phrase...............................................Second phrase|
Where the | markers above denote the page margins, and ....... represents a 'horizontal space' (which may or may not use space as the character, a 'dot' as above, or any other character), which effectively expands to take as much space as possible between the two pieces of text.
This is pretty common, e.g., when designing a table of contents manually*, or when trying to achieve the kind of "chapter X...........page Y" effect in headers.
I know there's a specific and easy way to introduce this kind of 'expanding horizontal space', because I've done it in the past. But I just can't find it anymore. I just vaguely remember that the relevant menu allowed you to specify what character you wanted to use in this 'expanding space'. Also, it may or may not have involved the use of tabs.
Any ideas?
* Yes I know about the "Table of Contents" menu option, no I'm not trying to design a table of contents, it was just an example :)
I remembered.
Create a tab stop on the horizontal ruler above the page, right click to convert from a 'left' stop to a 'right' stop, and drag that stop all the way to the right margin.
Then, next time you press 'tab', the tab will automatically push any content to the right of your cursor, all the way to the right margin.
If you optionally also specify a fill character in the 'Tabs' tab of the 'Paragraph' formatting menu, the tab space will be filled with that character.

Avoid losing format after selecting all text and start typing

We use TinyMCE as the wysiwyg editor for our content builder. You can drag and drop a text module and once you click an edit button an TinyMCE instance will open. This works really well.
Problem is now that the builder is made for designers so a lot of the times you add a text module just for a 1 word heading or other cases where you only have one block. (one h1, one p etc.) You can also see this behavior in the official demos: Just add an lonely h2 heading, select all text and start to write.
Now Tiny MCE has the default behavior that if you select the complete text (which is almost always the case if you for example change an 1 line / word heading) and you start typing you will lose your formats completely. ( in our case: color, font-size, font-weight, line-height etc.)
This makes editing an heading for example really painful. Best workaround so far is to leave 1 character to not lose the format and then delete the character in the end.
I never saw that behavior in other editors so my question is: Is there maybe an easy setting or workaround to avoid this?
If there are situations where you want a root element to be something specific (e.g. <h2>) you can use the forced_root_block setting on that instance of TinyMCE to force a specific element:
https://www.tinymce.com/docs/configure/content-filtering/#forced_root_block
Even if you delete all text the new text will be wrapped with that root element. See this TinyMCE Fiddle for examples:
http://fiddle.tinymce.com/SOfaab
I think this would address your one line issue?

Eclipse-RCP: Hide lines of text permanently, keep correct line numbers

I have text files which contain code inside an Editor. The user can run an analysis on a certain part of his code, which will result in a set of lines which should be hidden. Next I want to present the user with only the remaining lines, but with correct linenumbers, as from the original document. Possible solutions I thought of:
Open a new Editor which does not contain the hidden lines, but *somehow* still has correct line numbers
Hide the lines in the original editor, and offer a button for the user to 'unhide'. Probably a similar solution required as in 1.
I don't really know how to go about this. Folds would be a weird solution, because they can be unfolded individually, and seem to be more semantically tied to things like methods or classes. Also, simply creating a new document without the hidden lines results in wrong linenumbers.
Use a ProjectionViewer and reflection to invoke the private method ProjectionViewer.collapse(int offset int length). This method is only used internally to hide a certain portion of the text, by manipulating the ProjectionDocument (see http://eclipse.org/articles/Article-Folding-in-Eclipse-Text-Editors/folding.html).
After this, folding text in the editor using the annotations(the little +/- icons) WILL break everything, so this solution and regular folding are mutually exclusive.