I have a table cell of fixed large size, and in it is nothing but a Plain Text Content Control, whose default placeholder text "Click here to enter text" takes up only a small portion of that table cell.
The problem is that if the user clicks anywhere in the cell but outside of the control's placeholder text, then starts typing, the entered text will not be part of the control and will not be subject to the control's style or any other control properties.
So - other than adding a lot of dummy characters to the placeholder text, which doesn't seem to be predictable in its word-wrap behavior, is there a way to make the control's placeholder text (or, in general, its click-boundary) fill the entire table cell?
UPDATE actually there were some carriage returns after the control that I was not aware of; after deleting those, clicking anywhere in the cell as long as the x coordinate if the click is greater than or equal to the leftmost x coordinate of the control will edit the control text value as desired. If you click leftward of the control, you will end up editing whatever fixed text exists to the left of the control, i.e. a fixed text label. Still strange. The workaround here was to split cells for all multi line text entry areas, such that the label is on its own cell, and the control is now at the leftmost edge of its cell.
Content controls do not support something like expanding to the surrounding container. They will always use only the space that is required to render their content.
If you want to prevent users from clicking and typing text outside of the control, you could use the following approach:
Put a rich text content control around your table/table row/cell
Put the plain text content control as a nested content control in the table cell (the plain text content control must be non-vanishing for this to work)
Make the outer content control read-only
Now the only thing the user is allowed to edit is the inner plain text content control. The downside of this approach is that your document now contains areas that are locked. This has an impact on usability, first, because, it may not be obvious to the user why certain areas cannot be modified, and second, because a lot of standard actions do no longer work if part of the selection is locked (e.g. Select All > Update ToC).
Related
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.
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.
I would like to have a text box and a button in my GUI. When the button is pressed, a history window will come up, and if the user selects a previous entry the text that they have highlighted in the edit box will be overwritten.
It should work like copy-pasting, whatever is selected in the history window should be pasted over what is selected, or the new text should be added wherever the cursor is.
Is there any way in Matlab to do this? Is it possible to access what is highlighted in an edit box?
With vanilla Matlab this isn't possible. It appear that Mathworks is in the process of expanding what they support with GUIs (survey 1, survey 2), but as of yet they don't allow this.
One possible workaround is using findjobj.m, by Yair Altman. He discusses edit boxes in this post
You can trace findjobj.m for your text box to find 1 or 2 lines of code that are needed so you don't have to carry around all 3,400 lines of it.
Then all you really need to do is get the selected indices and work from there.
javaHandle = findjobj(editBoxHandle);
startSelect = get(javaHandle,'SelectionStart');
endSelect = get(javaHandle,'SelectionEnd');
Once you have the indexes of what text is selected, it becomes almost trivial to replace that text with the new text.
text = editBoxHandle.String;
editBoxHandle.String = [text(1:startSelect) newText text(endSelect:end)];
One thing to note, when the user clicks the button the text box will lose focus, and it will no longer be clear what text is selected. You can remedy this by giving focus back to the text box, and re-selecting what was selected in the button's callback.
uicontrol(editBoxHandle); %Give focus to the edit box, selecting the entire text
javaHandle.select(startSelect,endSelect); %select/highlight the correct stuff
This will highlight the text that will be replaced with the users selection
I am developing an OpenOffice Writer template that can be used to fill in reports for a child-care centre.
There are some standard outcomes, comprising long sentences, and I want the user to be able to select the appropriate sentence from a combo box. I have entered the sentences into a table in Openoffice Base database, which is then connected to a series of combo boxes in a Writer template. However, when the user choose an option that contains a very long sentence, only the text up to the length of the combo box is visible.
What I want to do is have the selected value of the combo-box wrap over several lines when selected so that all the (very long) text appears in the selected box when the user chooses a long sentence from the combo.
I have been looking through the properties of the combo box control, but have yet to identify one that will allow the selected value in the combo box to word-wrap (so that I could make the combo-box several lines in height such that the entire sentence would fit into the box).
Any pointers on how I could do this would be much appreciated.
thanks,
David.
Thanks Jim K, that was helpful. In the end, what I wound up doing was creating a textbox which I named "selectedOutcomeATextBox" immediately below my combo box which was named "OutcomeCombo".
I then attached the following macro code to the textModified event associated with the "selectedOutcomeATextBox":
Sub UpdateOutcomeA
Dim Doc As Object
Dim Form As Object
Dim Ctl As Object
Dim newCtl as Object
Doc = ThisComponent
Form = Doc.DrawPage.Forms.GetByIndex(0)
Ctl = Form.getByName("OutcomeCombo")
newCtl = Form.getByName("selectedOutcomeATextBox")
newCtl.Text = Ctl.Text
End Sub
I also set the "Printable" property of the "OutcomeCombo" to "No", so that when the document prints, the combo box itself does not appear on the printed page, but the "selectedOutcomeATextBox" textbox which has had its value set by the macro when I choose a value from the combo box does appear with the desired text. I also set the "TextType" property of the selectedOutcomeATextBox" text box to "Multi-Line", so that extra long text will wrap to the next line, thereby showing the very long strings that are stored there.
Thanks heaps Jim K.
cheers,
David Buddrige
Apparently combo boxes do not have the MultiLine attribute. The question was asked a few years ago here but was not solved.
One alternative that requires some macro programming is to use a single multi-line text field and then make a scroll bar button that changes the choice. Instead of a scroll bar, two buttons could be used to change the choice (Previous / Next), or even a list box control. Using a list box control in this way would have the advantage that they could see all the choices at once, like a combo box.
Another approach is to break up each sentence and display the parts across several lines of a list box. Then when one line is clicked, all the lines of a sentence are selected at once, using an event listener for the list box. This could be shown in addition to an ordinary editable multi-line text box, in case none of the answers in the list are wanted.
One more idea: Radio buttons can have multiple lines, so dynamically show radio buttons, one for each sentence. A dialog window could be displayed to hold the radio buttons. The result of the dialog would be used to fill the multi-line text field.
Or you could just live with the truncated sentences. Maybe it would help to make the control a little wider, or abbreviate the sentences.
I have a row in a tablex that I want to hide based on a condition. I can do this with the visibility property and also using CanShrink as well is an option.
I've tried both of these and the best I can do is hide the row (make it invisible), but it keeps the whitespace it takes up - I need to remove the whitespace too so if it is not shown that it doesn't take up paper/viewing space.
I have also made the height of the row very small and put cangrow=true so that that if i populate the field with data based on an expression it will grow to the right size but this is not ideal because there is still 0.03125in of space for the row that is always shown (minimim height) and if it grows it grows to fit the text but not neccessarily the set size I want.
I thought I had done this before in an older version of RS but I can't seem to get it to work correctly in this version (2008).
Any ideas?
Try to set the Hidden property of the Static Row Group under the Details Group, in this case the whole row will disappear instead of the content of the textboxes.
If you are using Report Builder, you need to switch to Advanced Mode (make sure that the Properties and the Grouping windows are displayed, go to the upper right side of the Grouping window and press the black triangle):
Click on the second "Static" item under the "(Details)" group and you can set the Hidden property on the Properties window.
Link to MSDN sample
A simpler way to get to this option for hiding a row is to right-click on the row header and select "Row Visibility". From there you will get a dialog where to can enter an expression.
I was able to make the rows go away by setting the following 2 properties
textbox.CanShrink
row.Hidden
I played w/ row.HideIfNoRows and it seems to have no effect in accomplishing the desired outcome described by op.
Click on textbox, these one is in the properties of the textbox
(if there are multiple columns, I assume you will have to make this setting for each cell/textbox, in my case, I only had 1 column)
CanShrink=false
For the next property, you have to go into ADVANCED MODE by clicking the down arrow at the right side of the Row Groups/Column Groups pane.
Click on the Row containing the line you would like to hide.
The Hidden property can be found in properties pane...
This is an alternate way to set Hidden, as opposed to right clicking the Row Header in the actual Tablix.
Hidden= <expression describing when you want the row hidden hidden>
One other note - If you right click the Row Header and choose 'Row Visibility' you get a dialgue. the Row Property dialog has a caption "Show or Hide Based on an expression".
The actual behaviour is It will HIDE the row if the expression evaluates to TRUE.
IMHO - this is misleading, at best ambiguous.
Once you understand the property you are actually setting is called HIDDEN, then this makes sense. Until then, I certainly assumed I was setting a property called Visisble... FWIW....
On the empty row you want to hide, go to the text box properties and go to expressions -> visibility, then show or hide based on an expression and use
=iif(first(Fields!.Value = ""),true,false)
Setting row visibility logic is important, but I've learned that sometimes a blank row will still appear, even though its contents are hidden. To solve this, I had to do the following non-intuitive steps, but I did in fact succeed in completely suppressing unwanted white space.
In the cell in the tablix region, use the Insert > Rectangle menu option.
In the rectangle, use the Insert > Textbox menu option. Resize as needed.
In the textbox, right-click and enter a placeholder.
Set the value of the placeholder expression to whatever you need.