I have been using kite(python) for the past few months and I really like how I can just glance at my other monitor to view all the documentation of a function. The main thing that I like about it is that it updates pretty much instantly when my cursor moves to another function(-call) and that I can span it over a large area on my display so I see all the documentation at once.
I was wondering if this or something similar can be done within visual studio code itself. It can show a preview/the entire documentation of a function in a small popup so it must be possible to show it in a separate tab that also updates when your cursor moves to another function, right?
TL;DR: I want to view the documentation of the function under my cursor in a separate window.
Is this possible? How can I configure this?
I know I can get the whole body of a document with context.document.body.getOoxml() and the current selection with context.document.getSelection(), however I can't find a way to establish what is currently on screen and what is not...
Is there a method in the Word Office JS api to retrieve only the content currently displayed on the screen?
There isn't a solution for this. The way some of the JavaScript libraries in web pages are able figure out this problem is through the view port.
Example here: https://www.customd.com/articles/13/checking-if-an-element-is-visible-on-screen-using-jquery
See another helpful SO answer here: Get the browser viewport dimensions with JavaScript
Now - Word however uses HTML as a way of formatting - and not as a way of directly displaying things. So even if you could run the same library on the HTML - it wouldn't have the same context.
The best you could do is to get the height of the visible space (which should be the same height as your add-in frame) and attempt to do some mapping. You would have some weird edge cases though, like if the font-size is different, or you have a page-break in the view etc...
I'm implementing a document viewer with highlighting/annotation capabilities for a custom document format on iPad. The documents are kind of long (100 to 200 pages, if printed on paper) and I've had a hard time finding the right approach. Here are the requirments:
1) Basic rich-text styling: control of left/right margins. Control of font name, size, foreground/background color, and line spacing. Bold, italics, underline, etc.
2) Selection and highlighting of arbitrary text regions (not limited to paragraph boundaries, like in Safari/UIWebView).
3) Customization of the Cut/Copy/Paste popup (UIMenuController) This is one of the essential requirements of the app.
My first implementation was based on UIWebView. I just rendered the document as HTML with CSS for text styling. But I couldn't get the kind of text selection behavior I wanted (across paragraph boundaries) and the UIMenuController can't be customized from within UIWebView.
So I started working on a javascript approach, faking the device text-selection behavior using JQuery to trap touch events and dynamically modifying the DOM to change the background color of selected regions of text. I built a fake UIMenuController control as a hidden DIV, positioning it and unhiding it whenever there was an active selection region.
Not too shabby.
The main problem is that it's SLOOOOOOOW. Scrolling through the document is nice and quick, but dynamically changing the DOM is not very snappy. Plus, I couldn't figure out how to recreate the magnifier loupe, so my fake text-selection GUI doesn't look quite the same as the native implementation. Also, I haven't yet implemented the communication bridge between the javascript layer and the objective-c layer (where the rest of the app lives), but it was shaping up to be a huge hassle.
So I've been looking at CoreText, but there are precious few examples on the web. I spent a little time with this simple little demo:
http://github.com/jonasschnelli/I7CoreTextExample/
It shows how to use CoreText to draw an NSAttributedText string into a UIView. But it has its own problems: It doesn't implement text-selection behavior, and it doesn't present a UIMenuController, so I don't have any idea how to make that happen. And, more importantly, it tries to draw the entire document all at once, with significant performance degradations for long documents. My documents can have thousands of paragraphs, and less than 1% of the document is ever on screen at a time.
On the plus side, these documents already contain precise formatting information. I know the exact page-position of every line of text, so I don't need a layout engine.
Does anyone know how to implement this sort of view using CoreText? I understand that a full-fledged implementation is overkill for a question like this, but I'm looking for a good CoreText example with a few basic requirements:
1) Precise layout & formatting control (using the formatting metrics and text styles I've already calculated).
2) Arbitrary selection of text.
3) Customization of the UIMenuController.
4) Efficient recycling of resources for off-screen objects.
I'd be happy to implement my own recycling when text elements scroll off-screen, but wouldn't that require re-implementing UIScrollView?
I'm brand-new to iPhone development, and still getting used to Objective-C, but I've been working in other languages (Java, C#, flex/actionscript, etc) for more than ten years, so I feel confident in my ability to get the work done, if only I had a better feel for the iPhone SDK and the common coding patterns for stuff like this. Is it just me, or does the SDK documentation really suck?
Anyhow, thanks for your help!
Does your document have any semantic components other than each paragraph? If you already have some concept of sections or pages, I would recommend you render each one of those as an independent tablecell. It's pretty simple to create a tablecell that makes you forget you're actually looking at a UITableView. All you would need to do is override drawRect: and setSelected: and setHighlighted: and tah dah! No More cell dividers unless you want them. Furthermore you could do some nifty things by using a tableview as your base. If you defined sections in the UITableView then you could have a nifty header that scrolls along as you're paging through your document. Another thing you could do is add a "jump to section" bar / a bookmarks menu, and that way you don't have to provide selection across the boundaries of sections.
Massive copy paste blocks would be pretty painful on the system as well. Further, if you went through the trouble to provide this content you might not want to make it too easy for someone to copy it all at once... (Can't follow this line of thought more without more specifics on your project).
If you really do want to provide the copy paste options you could add buttons to each logical page or section that immediately selects and copies the whole section for the user's convenience. (Maybe with citation associated?)
I recommend you lookup the UITableViewCell UITableViewDelegate and UITableViewDataSource in the SDK docs as those pages will significantly help if you choose to use this suggestion.
Just two random observations:
Can you afford to create a paging interface? (As opposed to “endless scrolling”.) It looks like a paging interface would be a lot easier on system resources.
The UIActionBar is actually the UIMenuController class. The interface is a bit weird, as the menu is a singleton (wtf?), but I’m sure you’ll have no trouble figuring it out.
Hope that helps.
Here's a potential solution, but I don't know if it's crazy. Since I'm still so new to iPhone development, this might be a big no-no.
Anyhow, I had the idea to render each paragraph of the document (whose dimensions I've already precisely calculated) as a cell in a UITableView. Since UITableView already has mechanisms for cell recycling, I wouldn't have to implement that from scratch, and the document could be arbitrarily long without causing resource consumption problems.
Of course, I'd want to get rid of the line separators between cells, since I want the UI to look like a document instead of a table.
Or maybe I could render each page of the document (like a typical PDF, this is a paged-document format) as a table cell, and override the cell-separator graphic to look like a page boundary...
But would it be possible to get rid of the default touch behavior within the table, and instead implement text-selection on the table cell contents? Would it be completely impossible to implement text selection that crosses paragraph boundaries (between multiple table cells)?
The UIWebView is a good choise, but we need another application to pre render the pages percisely using each font and each style sheet and store the rendring information into a database table:
chapter_id int primary key,
startlocation int,
end location int,
fontsize int (or stylesheetname string)
Using JavaScript we can calculate how many words fit in a div with out scrolling.
UIWebView is good as it provide rich content and it has selection and highlighting behavior.
Hope this helps.
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.
I would like to arrange UIControls in WPF in a similar way to the applications on the iPhone. They should be positioned on a grid, but a user should be able to drag them somewhere else, after releasing the mouse button (or the finger in case of an iPhone) the selected UIControl should snap back to the next position in the grid. The other UIElements should be rearranged automatically.
Further the user should also be connect two elements with a line or something.
I'm not experienced with WPF. The first question is if there is a container which is suitable for something (System.Windows.Controls.Grid ?) or if I have to extend canvas or somethig else for this.
I would like to know which elements from the WPF framework can be used and which elements I have to write myself.
For people who do not own an iPhone: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3omhu2AUWC8
Update
I've looked at AnimatedTilePanel in the BangOTricks examples (see below), this one explains how to create your own Panel and how to let it arrange things there.. However I still need an idea how to implement drag and drop correctly in this example..
Unfortunately, you'll have to write a lot of things yourself, as WPF doesn't automatically do what you're looking for.
For positioning the controls, you can use either UniformGrid or Grid. Assuming it's much like the iPhone video you showed, you can just use the UniformGrid with 4 columns and however many rows you need.
For the dragging animation, layout-wise, you could start by manipulating the RenderTransform property on whatever is being dragged, but you'll have to set a handler to check once you've met whatever threshold necessary to move into the another "cell" -- and at that point, you'll have to changed the order of the items in the tree.
Take a look at AnimatedTilePanel from Kevin's Bag-o-Tricks at:
http://j832.com/bagotricks/
It doesn't do everything you want but it will show you how to write a panel that animates its children when changing size or order.
New input to this old post in 09. Earlier this year (2012) someone has wrote a FluidWrapPanel and open sourced it. I tried it and it works like a charm - just like that on the iPhone menu.
You can also apply to other UI Elements or UserControl.