I've been using footnotes in markdown pages as mentioned in this post on DaringFireball, but I can't seem to figure out how to get them styled the way I want. Adding .footnotes {} to my style sheet allows me to style the footnote text, but I'm missing two things:
In Gruber's post, his footnote's backlink is given a style "a.footnoteBackLink," but my page simply produces "a href="link" rev="footnote". I don't know how to call this in CSS and I have no idea how I'd change it so that my markdown page outputs any differently. My backlink goes to a separate line, and I'd like to have it on the same line. Perhaps this is an issue with the markdown engine; I'm using Maruku (I think), and I could probably figure out how to change it if I knew which one I should use instead.
No matter what I put in the footnote brackets, the page outputs numbered footnotes. How can I tell it to use asterisks or other symbols? Most pages with footnotes will have only one or two, and symbols are generally correct when there are less than seven footnotes, so I'd like to do things proper.
I probably shouldn't even say this, but I've been teaching myself web development for the past couple of months and I absolutely could not have done it without SO. This is the first time I haven't found my answer here, so it's my first time asking. I love you don't get mad at me please.
There is a great variety of conversion tools out there. Each may have a different way of handling this. I found remarkable a good choice for your issue. It adds the class "footnote-item" to each footnote.
Check the live demo and inspect the HTML Output.
Related
I am reading some old posts on a web forum, and I guess they changed their code at some point because recent posts display correctly but old ones are often full of mojibake. Especially around the single curly quotemark which sometimes turns up used as an apostrophe.
Example, new post: "It’s a hard choice and I can see both sides..."
Example, old post: "I don’t think anyone has said that..."
I know this has to do with UTF-8 not being handled properly. What I'm wondering is, can I do anything in my own browser to automatically turn this '’' sequence back into a quotemark? It'd make everything a lot easier to read.
My ideas so far: maybe I could put some custom CSS in Stylebot? The other extension I use a lot is uBlock Origin but I don't think that'd help here. Can a CSS selector be used to replace text in the middle of a paragraph like that, or am I stuck with a 'run every page through Regexr before you try to read it' kind of situation?
Suppose you're developing a web site and blind users will be a significant chunk of your target market. If the web site includes document editing functionality, what would be appropriate WYSIWYM tools? Are languages like Markdown, Textile and Wiki Formatting really accessible or are they inconvenient to blind users?
I'm a blind programmer and while I haven't used most of the languages you mention I've found that any markdown language is fairly easy to use if you have the desire to learn it. I've had no problem using either HTML or several markup languages for wiki's. Part of it will depend on how invested the users are in your site. If it's a site that will be visited infrequently or for short periods of time, it's much less likely that a user will take the time to learn the required markup whether they are blind or not. Unfortunately, I have not found an accessible JavaScript WYSIWYG editor but I find it easier to manually enter the markup so haven't looked very hard.
the first question is: how important is semantic structure? could you get away with plain text. You could do simple parsing like treating blank lines as paragraph markers, treating a series of lines which begin with * as a bulleted list, identify URLs and make them into links, etc.
As a blind developer myself, I have no problem in understanding languages like Markdown. But if it's a syntax I'm unfamiliar with, I'll only learn it if I expect to use the site very often, or care deeply about the content.
Two final thoughts come to mind: while I certainly experience some accessibility challenges using TinyMCE, you could develop something much simpler - provide less than 10 formatting options, like inserting hyperlinks, making lists, centering text, setting the style (such as heading) etc.
And lastly, when I talk to non-technical blind people, they often just write their content in Word and paste into a wiki or blog post. This sounded strange when I first heard it, but it does make sense. So an ideal solution would accept pasted in content.
In closing - it depends how important this is, and how much effort you want to expend. Maybe a Markdown editor with a live preview (like on this site), buttons for inserting simple formatting like URLs, and the ability to paste in rich text would tick all boxes :-)
On a web page, the most accessible embedded text editor for blind users is one that uses standard HTML, such as a <textarea> element, with a corresponding <label> element:
<label for="editor">Enter your text here using wiki markup:</label>
<textarea id="editor"></textarea>
If a WYSIWYM tool is built using standard accessible HTML, then blind users can easily enter text into it, with full confidence that they're entering text in the right place. Then the question becomes: Which is the better markup language? They all require memorization, but some may be more intuitive than others. One way to find out which is best would be to do some usability testing with a wide variety of target users. Also be sure to providing easy, accessible access to syntax help.
Picture yourself working in pure text 80x4 display (just open a console and resize appropriately), then use vi/emacs/ed and you'll soon realize what markup will get in the way.
Try to do as much work as possible to understand plain text, else use light markup like POD, finally things like AsciiDoc are very powerful but needs training.
I don't know about WYSIWYG/WYSIWYM tools, but I do know that complying with W3C standards (especially their HTML5 en CSS3 drafts) while writing your own editor code will help a lot.
In CSS you can specify speed and intonation of speech. In HTML you can specify alternative text (alt attribute in many elements) that screen readers are compatible with. Be sure to know when to use the abbr and the acronym elements. Use the former when you want the screen reader to read the meaning of an abbreviation and the latter when the acronym should be read as a word (e.g. ASAP, NATO and OS).
For the editor itself, I recommend creating a WYSIWYG editor that uses divs and spans. Screen readers will understand easily the structure of a document. For the current line, use a text box; for every other line that's not being edited, convert the contents immediately to valid HTML.
If you find a good tool, be sure to post it here. I'm looking for one too. :-)
Some days ago I received a rather lengthy and somewhat elaborate MS Word document, which I was asked to convert to HTML for uploading to a 3rd party’s website. My first instinct was to save the Word document as HTML and use Dreamweaver’s "Clean Up Word HTML" Command. But not only did I have to leave it running all night for Dreamweaver to finish "cleaning", but the results were far from desirable in my opinion. There were still a lot of left over inline styles, etc. that Dreamweaver just plain missed.
I approached it differently this morning and just selected the entire document in Word, copied it, and then pasted it into Dreamweaver’s Design window. Not only was it much, much faster, but the output code was much, much cleaner! I didn’t have to run the "Clean Up Word HTML" Command afterwords either.
Now I don't ever convert a Word File straight to HTML for standards reasons. Instead I cut and paste content between Word and Dreamweaver. Happily I can do the following.
If a Word heading is in the Heading 1 Style, it will become an H1 in Dreamweaver (following the Dreamweaver stylesheet). Similarly Heading 2 becomes H2, Heading 3 becomes H3 and so forth.
If the Word author wasn't that organized, you can use a shortcut like Control+1 (or Command+1) on a Mac to convert any line to an H1. Can you guess the shortcut for H2? Yes it's Control+2 or Command+2 on a Mac.
Paragraphs now cut and paste as paragraphs (with the P tag). If you don't want an HTML paragraph right then, then use Control+0 (or Command+0 on a Mac) to remove it in Dreameaver.
A new one I discovered is that some embedded images in Word may be transferred to your Dreamweaver site as "clip" images when you copy and paste from Word. So, if you have a Word file with embedded images, you may be able to extract them fairly quickly via Dreamweaver.
I also found this free tool useful http://www.textfixer.com/html/convert-word-to-html.php it works same like design view of dreamweaver, useful for people who doesn't have Dreamweaver.
but what code we will get is depends on how much properly formatted MS word document is?
WORD 2007 has also style like html?
Headings, tables, ordered and unordered lists, bold, italic , hyperlinks etc?
How to use word 2007 semantically?
To get maximum possible semantic html
on save as html option
To get maximum possible clean code to
Copy in dreamweaver design view ?
To get maximum possible clean code to
place browser based WYSIWYG HTML
Editor which comes with every CMS
Does any knows any tips, tricks, tutorial , article or advice to format MS WORD documents semantically?
Or any other best way than mine?
HTML Tidy has options for this: word-2000, bare and clean.
FCKEditor and similar try to clean up code pasted from Word.
There's (rather old now) demoroniser.
However don't expect miracles. It's unlikely that Word document will have decent structure (it theoretically could, but no Word user bothers with this). These programs can't add semantic information if it's not there.
As for semantic editing in Word – use styles. It supports headers properly (sadly not much else). You can check that in outline view.
You don't need – and shouldn't use – spaces or line breaks for indentation or space adjustment. Word has ability to explicitly control paragraphs' padding.
I've found that the OpenOffice.org html generator (Open .doc in OO and save as HTML) works better than MS's in Office.
It's still not perfect, but gives MUCH cleaner HTML that's much more sane to look at.
There is no dependable way to clean up WORD docs and make them into nice HTML. If the document has any special characters, they are often encoded as Windows charset instead of UTF-8, so they just "break" when displayed online. The list goes on. You often end up with silliness like:
<strong>hello</strong><strong>th<strong>er</strong>e</strong><i></i>
The only depandable method is to paste it into Notepad and mark it up manually. You can write a few macros to do things like insert <p></p> at paragraph breaks, but that's about it.
If there is a huge volume of material that needs to go online from Word, you may be better off using a PDF.
have you tried this? Word Cleaner
Try our Doc To HTML Converter software. It was designed specially for the purpose of producing maximum possible clear (X)HTML code, and has many customizable options. It requires MS Word to be installed on your system. It is not free, but it has trial 30-day period.
I have my Drupal installation set up to use both Texy for markup (hand-writing HTML soon gets tedious) and GeSHi for syntax highlighting (which is about the only syntax highlighter I found for Drupal at that time).
The problem now is that since the last update to Texy seemingly nothing really works anymore. I spend a long time trying to convince both of them working together a while ago but it was a pretty flaky setup. Depending on the order of evaluation of both filters I either get no syntax highlighting or all, escaped HTML output, line breaks disappear or, sometimes, it can indeed work.
I am now at a point where it almost works again, but with exceptions. Ideally GeSHi would take care of the code, while Texy handles the rest, but that's not the case. The nice regular expression
[1–9][0–9]*[WDwd][1–9][0–9]*(\+[1–9][0–9]*)?
gets the part between the first two asterisks italicized, since Texy runs over that part as well. Which is unfortunate, since it changes the meaning of the regex.
Anyone out here who has insights of how to peroperly set up multiple filters for input in Drupal and how to handle non-HTML markup and syntax highlighting simultaneously. As I currently have to go over every post that contains code I have written (nearly all) it wouldn probably not much less work to completely redo every page on the site in search for a better setup. As for syntax highlighting, I have much need for the usual common languages, such as C#, Java, etc. but also for more esoteric ones like Windows batch files or Powershell. Simply dumping unhighlighted code there isn't very pretty.
So, actually I have two questions here:
How can one convince multiple input filters to work without interfering with each other, specifically Texy and GeSHI?
What other options are out there that meet my requirements of easy-to-write non-HTML markup1 and syntax highlighting even for lesser-used languages2?
1 Often I just need emphasis and strong emphasis, sometimes headings, often images, sometimes also tables. Oh, and usually code :-)
2 The Stack Overflow-like guessing for syntax highlighting doesn't work very well for most code, it just works well enough to be a little pleasing.
To answer 2. I have had good results with markdown and GeSHI. I have no experience with Texy.
What you must pay very good attention to, is the combination of filter-format settings, filter-format ordering, filter-format permissions. For your problem, I would suggest the following input formats.
Basic HTML (default). Used for comments and so on.
Markdown (For editors, does what you describe)
Raw HTML (no filtering at all usefull for webmasters etc.)
Then configure them as follows, in this order:
Basic HTML:
URL filter
HTML filter. only allow inline styles em, strong, a. Maybe a very few more, but not br, p and such.
linebreak filter.
Markdown
HTML filter: strips all tags, except the "code" tags for GESHI.
Markdown filter.
Geshi filter.
This implies that markdown has no limits: people can use markdown to creat H1 tags, for example. If you want to limit the abilities in Markdown, you must place the HTML filter after the markdown filter. In that set-up, markdown will convert to full HTML, then the HTML-filters will strip the not-allowed filters.
Since GeSHI requires non-standard code tags, you will want to let them fall-trough. Since GeSHI adds a bucketload of spans, divs and color-coded style-elements, you will always need to put this filter after the HTML-filter, to avoid these spans- etc to be removed again
I am working on an ASP.Net web application that must print dynamically created labels on standard Avery-style label sheets (one particular size, so only one overall layout). The labels have a variable number of lines (3-6) and may contain either lines of text or a graphic barcode image.
Our first cut, that I inherited, used monospaced fonts to reduce the formatting issues, but that did not allow enough text to the fit on the labels and the customer was dissatisfied. Basically it was formatted text.
My next version used TABLEs, DIVs, CSS, and a bit of JavaScript calculations to format the labels using proportional fonts. It still required a bit of tweaking (the user had to set their print margins correctly and turn off the print headers and footers), but it seemed to work.
However, it seems that there are some variations on how different printers render the text (WYS ain't WYG), so even though we tested on different browsers using at least two different printers (an inkjet and a laser printer), some user's labels don't line up. Slight margin variations can be adjusted by adjusting the margins on the page setup dialog, but the harder problem is that the inter-label spacing can be off by a tiny fraction of an inch, so that if the first label is pretty well centered, by the end of the page the label text and images have crawled off the top or bottom of the labels.
We are about to the point of switching to generating Word, Excel, or PDF output which is going to take quite a bit of development time and possible add extra steps in the printing process.
So, does anyone have any suggestions on how to do an HTML/CSS layout that will precisely render on different types of printers? I don't really care if the line/word breaks are a bit different, but I need to be able to predictably position the upper left corners of each label area.
Right now the labels flow down the page in a table and we have been tweaking the box model of the cells and internal DIVs to make them a uniform height. I suspect that using absolute positioning of each element may be the best answer, but that is going to be tricky as well due to the ASP.Net generation of the label elements. If I knew for sure that would work, I would rather try it than throw away everything we have to go to a different generation method.
Slight Update:
Right now I'm doing some tests with absolute positioning - setting only the top and left coordinate of a containing block element. So far there are minor variations on the offset onto the page (margins, paper alignment, etc.), but all browsers and printers tested put the elements in exactly the right spots relative to each other. I appreciate the PDF tips, but does anyone know of additional "gotchas" on using absolute positioning this way?
Update:
For the record, I rewrote the label printing portion using iTextSharp and it works perfectly - definitely the way to do this in the future...
Forget HTML and make a PDF. HTML printing is extremely variable - not just across browsers but across different versions of the same browser. PDF is a lot easier.
Even if you get it exactly right with one browser / font setup / printer / phase of the moon, it will be the most fragile thing you've ever had to maintain. No matter how long you think it will take to make a PDF (and it's not really that hard as there are some free libraries out there), HTML will ultimately take a lot more of your time. PDF readers are widely deployed and print more consistently than even Word files.
The web is not a format that is guaranteed to get consistent print results. Given the standard support for label printing with MS Word, and the relative ease of automation and generation, I would strongly recommend going that route.
I'm not aware of ANY method to get percise printing across all types of browsers, operating systems, and printers when using web content.
"precisely" and "printing" aren't two words that really work together that well. I did an OCR/OMR application a year or so ago, and even when building a PDF I saw significant differences between different print drivers and such. Because of that, my gut is to tell you that you might not have 100% success.
If CSS and layout issues don't work that well for you, you might need to resort to building the labels as images using GDI+ -- at least that way you can use GetFontMetrics() and such.
Good luck!
I had a similiar issue and the answer is you can't do it. Instead, I generated a PDF file in realtime using iTextSharp and passed that to the response.
Using SQL Server Reporting Services, I generate a PDF to send to the printer, but it can be seen as HTML on the screen using the control you can include in your web pages. There are RDLC files that are available on the internet to print to various Avery formats.
I rewrote the SharpPDFLabel code that was mentioned back in 2011 this week as I needed it to be a lot more flexible (and to work with the current iTextSharp library).
You can get it here:
https://github.com/finalcut/SharpPDFLabel
I added the ability to specify the contents of each individual label if you want (or to continue creating a sheet of identical labels too). By extending the LabelDefinition class you can specify the layout of your labels pretty easily.
I also struggled with the HTML/CSS approach due to the inconsistent printing behaviour across browsers.
I created a C# library to produce Avery Labels from ASP.NET which I hope you might find useful:
https://github.com/wheelibin/SharpPDFLabel#readme
You can add images and text to the labels, and it's easy to define more labels types.
(I use it for barcode labels, the barcode is generated as an image and then added to the label using this library.)
Cheers
Add a few options to your app that let users adjust spacing for their particular configuration. You could include this right on the label if you want, and style it away via media selectors, but you'll probably want to persist them somewhere, too.
Flash is also good method to push a printable like a label albeit a little more complex to implement and maintain. In most cases it displays much quicker than a PDF and you can embed it into the design of the page and simply add a "Print" button within the flash.
I did this several years ago when we were using HTML and PDF to generate confirmation receipts. HTML is "ok" but is at the mercy of the end users web browser so we quickly dumped that method. PDF's are good as long as they have a PDF reader, which to our surprise a lot of our customers did not. So that was dumped as well after we switched to a FLASH version using a simple flash movie that included a few dynamic text areas and a "print" button. I communicated the data between the page and flash using a few flash vars. You can also use web service.
When I need something more than just simple text I use the free community edition of the PDF Generator component from DynamicPDF.com. It works great and is very quick.
I just went through the same thing. Ended up switching and making a short little JSF app (running on Glassfish) that uses JasperReports to print directly to the lable printer. Push button, instant label at the printer, don't even have to view it on-screen if you don't want to since Jasper can directly output to printer (as well as PDF in browser).