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How can I make generated content selectable?
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Closed 7 years ago.
I am digitizing a 75-page index of job competencies. Users need to be able to link to each competency, competencies are meaningfully grouped, and competencies are often a sentence long. So instead of using each competency's text as an anchor, I'm creating a labeling scheme and creating anchors for each item. The competency "Know your right hand from your left" might be given the label "E.1.A.2.2". This is tedious.
I'm trying to save myself from manually adding the label to every competency again (since I've already added it once in the anchor.) To show the label, I can use the pseudo-element :before to generate the label from the anchor, {content: attr(name);}.
That works nicely, but the generated text isn't selectable. To create a link to a specific competency, users will have to manually type in "#E.1.A.2.2", which invites more user error than I'd like to think about.
Is it possible to make text generated by a pseudo-element selectable? I'm open to other suggestions as well. If creating each label in HTML is the only way to get to the needed result, I'll do that. But ouch.
To make it selectable and indexable by search engines I think the only way is to add content using JS
For example jQuery code:
$div.prepend("<span>My Text</span>")
Related
I am in the process of writing a text editor. After looking at other text editors I have noticed that a number of them refer to a "soft" versus "hard" wrap. What is the difference? I can't seem to find the answer by searching.
A hard wrap inserts actual line breaks in the text at wrap points, with soft wrapping the actual text is still on the same line but looks like it's divided into several lines.
It's usual for text editors to auto-wrap text into paragraphs with hard newlines, but it's less common for the text to be re-flowed into a nice paragraph if you come back later and edit/add/remove words later on. (You can do this manually in emacs with M-q.)
This is rather annoying, since obsessive compulsive people like me then go back and have to manually re-insert the hard breaks at the appropriate points.
On the other hand, soft wrapping is annoying because most all command line tools use line-based diff-ing (version control is where this becomes most noticeable to me). If you've got a 1/3-page paragraph that's soft wrapped and fix a typo, it's basically impossible to see where the change is in a regular diff output or similar.
soft : The text in the textarea is not wrapped when submitted in a form. This is default
hard : The text in the textarea is wrapped (contains newlines) when submitted in a form. When "hard" is used, the cols attribute must be specified
Reference: W3Schools
I'm trying to create a report with a layout as shown in the picture. The value of each field is underlined to the full width of the report. If it occupies more than one line each line is underlined. And there is also a short comment under the first line explaining the meaning of the field (shown in parentheses).
When we faced the same problem using JasperReports we had to create a custom component for that purpose. Does anyone know what the solution in BIRT might look like?
The only way I can think of is to calculate the line wrapping yourself, eg. converting your long text into a series of single lines.
Say you find a way to do this in a scripted data set, using the long text as an input.
You could then use a table item to render these single lines in the layout; using the bottom border to create the underlines (or possible an empty extra detail row with a top border and a height of 2pt to create nice line spacing).
Now how would this scripted data set look like?
I think when you study the source code of BIRT, you'll probably somewhere find a utility function that calculates the width (in whatever units) of a given text in a given font and size. Maybe this is also somewhere inside java.awt or inside iText (com.lowagie.text).
Then it is possible to call this function from inside Java Script and - with more or less logic - to use this as a basis for your scripted data set. But I think this will take a few hours to code.
If you manage to do this, it'd be nice if you post the solution here.
I'm using the code found here to create my text links located on this page. What I am trying to accomplish is having the rollover text be the description of the link ie: 'Insight' goes to the 'About' page. Some of descriptions are too long and are getting cut off and when I try to make them bigger they just overlap the link next to it. Any suggestions on how to fix it or a better method I should be using? Here is the HTML I'm using.
<span data-title="Services">Ingenuity.</span>
Sounds like you're asking for design advice as well.
Judging by the way you have your links presented (each list item with an equal fixed width in a row), a longer description will certainly overlap other links if you do end up finding a solution to make them not "cut off" (it exists, but I'm just not sure if it'll give you a desired result that you're looking for).
Either customize the widths of each list item so they don't overlap, or use some other cool transition (i.e. have the description slide down under the link rather than flip it). That's what I would suggest personally; however, it's up to you to choose what's considered a "better method" of displaying your descriptions.
What kinds of options do I have when a dropdown menu is faced with text that is so wide that extending the menu's width to accommodate is not feasible? i.e. It breaks the page layout, or just looks too ugly if the dropdown is adjusted to fit the long item.
Truncation?
Truncation plus full hover text?
Don't allow items that long?
Anyone encountered any elegant solutions to this?
Thanks.
I realise I'm fairly late to this question, but I've been hunting for an answer and I may have found a fairly elegant solution.
Have a look here:
http://www.getharvest.com/blog/2009/12/dropdown-problems-on-internet-explorer/
http://www.dougboude.com/blog/1/2008/05/Viewing-Option-Text-in-IE7-thats-Wider-than-the-Select-List.cfm
The first link talks about a couple of solutions before recommending a solution based on the second link.
The idea is that on click, you change the width of the <select> tag such that it is big enough to show the full text of the options. By keeping the <select> tag inside a div with overflow set to 'hidden', it doesn't screw with the rest of the page.
Try it out - it's a pretty good solution.
Truncation with tooltip would be my choice....
The last time i had to do that i used a telerik control, which was quite UI rich.
I agree with GordonB regarding truncating the options. Excessively long options can be hard to read, and as you mentioned it looks horrible.
If your dropdown is populated from user input, however, I'd restrict the length. What can be said with 15 words should be said with 5 ... if it can't, then perhaps a dropdown isn't your best option.
For example, if your options are the titles of research papers and their authors, you can probably abbreviate them down to a few key words ("String Theory and You [Brown 2008]"). On the other hand, if the options themselves differ by only a few words and lose meaning if they are truncated (e.g. a list of options like "Peanut butter and grape jelly sandwich with carrot sticks and soy milk" and "Peanut butter and boysenberry jelly sandwith with carrot sticks and 2% milk") maybe you would be better served by displaying all the options sequentially, accompanied by a checkbox or radio button as appropriate.
(If you're using ASP.NET, basically I'm saying using a repeater instead of a DropDownList)
This second approach might also allow you to incorporate other elements that you wouldn't be able to in a dropdown. Take a look at this Amazon search result page for ideas.
Give the element a maximum width with the CSS property max-width.
Most browsers show the options at full width regardless of the dropdown's actual width whereas IE crops them to the width of the select box. So the problem is really browser specific.
I've made a solution using absolute positioning on the dropdown so that I could extend it's width on hover in IE without breaking my layout. A bit hacky but it's one option.
I've been using commercial ASP.NET control that is implemented using <div> rather than <select>. This way we could put multiline elements on it, style it as we wanted and do some other stuff.
Depends how wide you are talking, what the context is. Often this comes down to a design problem rather than a coding problem. If the text is really long you will have usability problems regardless because reading long text in a dropdown is difficult. My options would be:
If the dropdown is really narrow and the longest items aren't very long (eg 3-4 words) change the design to accommodate it.
If the text is really long (eg sentences) then truncate it if you can. Sometimes text isn't amenable to this (eg. you may end up with multiple items with the same text). You can't really put tooltips on select list items.
If the text is really long and can't be truncated, you may want to consider a different UI option.
Why not create a calculated field which is based on the lengthy field.
Only create it to only be the first 50 (say) characters.
=LEFT([Title],50)
Then reference that field in the drop down.
I'm working on an ASP.NET website that needs to be internationalized. I'm using .resx files (essentially key-value pairs in a file) to populate static string fields on a page in different languages depending on the chosen culture/locale. I'm implementing Japanese and getting some stubborn vertical strings.
When copy and pasting them into the .resx file, they are horizontal (source of strings is Google Translate, for testing purposes). All of the strings appear normal, but one always displays vertically. The misbehaving string is a few div's deep (like all of them) and only has font-size, font-family, color, and an uppercase transform applied to it.
Removing any or all of the above rules does not change the orientation of the text. I've cleaned the formatting off the offending text with Notepad and shortened it (to ensure it wasn't a length problem). I'm stumped as to why this particular string is stubbornly vertical.
Here is the text in question: ログアウト
(Translation: Logout)
Edit
Clarification of the issue.
What it should look like:
The vertical text in question:
How can I force vertical text to be
horizontal?
Other than the title, I don't really understand your question. I'll take a guess anyway.
Try adding white-space: nowrap to the div that's misbehaving.
Recently I was doing some learning about right-to-left on the web and learned that Unicode characters have a directional property associated with them at the character level. So this might have something to do with that, though I certanily wouldn't know how to ascertain that or fix it, especially given that Google Translate is the source of the strings.
It happens quite often for Asian scripts (not just Japanese but also Korean and Chinese) to have text rendered incorrectly. Usually you just need to play with element width, especially if it is part of HTML table.