Adding object to paragraph style in InDesign - layout

I am trying to add a short underline in the paragraph style for my inline headlines. At the moment I am doing it with Paragraph Rules - rule below + offset and right indent (see attached image, the orange line). But this solution only works if the columns are always the same width.
Is there a way to add a object/line, with a defined width, to a paragraph style?

Spontaneously, would say no. However that would be easy to set while adding some contents. You could however use a dedicated character style (underline) taht you would attach with agrep style to a tab character. Then you can control "rule" width with a tab position.

Sure. Here it is…(and now just adding characters so stackoverflow will accept my if not too brief message…)

The fact is that you need to add a new line and type in a tab character. The presence of that tab will draw the "rule".

Other solution is to use both "Above" and "Below" rules.
Playing with below's weight, color (white), offset and left indent would make it independent on column width (ruleAbove has entire column range)

Here is how I would solve it:
Create a Stroke Style with Pattern Length = to the page size of your document (not text frame or column) and Length = to whatever length of your line should be.
Example:
Pattern Length = 8.5in (letter size paper)
Length = 1in (width of line under paragraph)
Use Rule Under in the paragraph style and apply the stroke style you created. Make sure to set Width to "Text".
Apply any color/offset, etc. options.
This will work independently of the text column width and text length.

Related

Letter Spacing on Curves SVG Makes Letters Tilted Using D3

When I add letter-spacing style to my text on path in D3, it tilts the letters and they don't follow nicely the circle anymore (see highlighted letters on image 2)
You can see my D3 code in this notebook
I've tried to do it in InkScape and it looks like it handles the letter-spacing differently (see image 3)
The style in the inkscape for the text is
font-size:17.6389px;line-height:1.25;text-align:center;text-decoration-color:#000000;letter-spacing:5.29167px;writing-mode:vertical-lr;text-anchor:middle;white-space:pre;fill:#990000;fill-opacity:1;fill-rule:evenodd;stroke:none;stroke-width:3.77953;stroke-miterlimit:4;stroke-dasharray:none;stroke-opacity:1;paint-order:stroke fill markers;stop-color:#000000
and for textPath is
font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;font-stretch:normal;font-size:17.6389px;font-family:Arial;-inkscape-font-specification:Arial
I've tried to use some of these attributes, but I cannot get the same result in D3. I would like the letters to be straight as in InkScape
Thanks for your help.
It might be impossible to center the letter with the letter-spacing attribute to be tilted symetrically.
I ended up creating a function that add non-breakable spaces between every character d.data.split("").join("\xa0".repeat(d.space)) where d.data is the text and d.space is the number of spaces inbetween every letter. This is just good for me now and give the following result.

How to set individual font color using extendscript

I have created a paragraph text in after effects using Extendscript
For example i have a text "HI". I need to give color for "H" as red [1,0,0] and "I" as green [0,1,0].
I have checked everywhere ,. where i can find out that i can change the text color in whole rather than individually ! is there anything that can be done?
I need to change color of each and individual characters using script
It looks like it's not possible. The text in a text layer is a TextDocument object, and when you look at the AE scripting guide it says
TextDocument fillColor attribute
textDocument.fillColor
Description
The text layer’s fill color, as an array of [r, g, b] floating-point values. For example, in an 8-bpc project, a red
value of 255 would be 1.0, and in a 32-bpc project, an overbright blue value can be something like 3.2.
NOTE: If the text layer has different fill color settings for each character, this attribute returns the setting for the first character. Also, if you change the value, it resets all characters in the text layer to the specified setting.
Type
Array [r, g, b] of floating-point values; read/write.
The important bit is the Note. The same thing applies for all the text attributes like fontSize, fill, stroke &c., &c..
So for some reason you can't access the style attributes for anything but the first character in a line of text. Are you annoyed? I am. Perhaps log a bug with Adobe—it will be completely futile, but you might feel better.

Create Overstrike Effect In A Cell

I have been asked if there is any way to get Excel to produce an overstrike effect in a cell. My first attempt was the use the BACKSPACE character:
="A" & CHAR(8) & "B"
But the display does not seem to honor the BACKSPACE:
Is this a font problem? Is there a unicode approach ?
I hate to tell the client to search for a custom font.
EDIT#1:
For example. This code:
Sub XBar()
ActiveCell.Font.Name = "Arial MS Unicode"
ActiveCell.Value = "X" & ChrW(773)
End Sub
Visually produces:
but this is not a general solution.
You can extend the character set by putting one character on top of another BUT you can only do this with a limited set of symbols. These are known at the "Combining Diacritical Marks" and usually live towards the end of the font set.
For a spreadsheet document, I wanted to put in 9 recurring (ie 9 with a dot above it). This does not exist as one character but can be made by combining two.
First of all put in the 9, then from the Combining Diacritical Marks, choose the . and one will go above the other. I actually had to do this in Word and then copy and paste the new characters back to Excel to make them work.
Once in Excel, I used a look up to convert the digit 9 into the dotted digit 9 wherever I needed it.
Different fonts have different ranges of these characters. Arial Unicode MS has some unusual ones. You need to look at the fonts and choose the most appropriate for your needs.
However, on the whole, I don't think you can put a B on top of an A!
Are you trying to do this?
If so, then select the character(s) you'd like to strikethrough, click the arrow icon in the font section (circled below) and tick the box next to strikethrough.
See here for more information.

svg concatenate text of different styles

I am using d3 to create an axis label inside an svg element. Part of the label is constant (string literal) and part of it varies as the user clicks around. To emphasize that it changes, I want it to be bold, while the rest of the text is normal weight. Aligning these two text elements, to each other and the rest of the drawing, has turned out to be quite difficult.
Also, it seems trailing spaces in text elements are ignored, making it harder to do the concatenation. And if there's a way to change styles within a text element, that would work too.
Here is a very hacky way of doing it, in that it won't work with three pieces of text (because text-anchor), and the result is hard to center (do I really need to go use getBBox()?).
function renderLabel(dynamicText){
svg.select(".label").remove();
var label = svg.append("g")
.attr("class", "label")
label.append("text")
.attr("text-anchor", "end")
.text("The Axis is Based On ");
label.append("text")
.attr("text-anchor", "start")
.style("font-weight", "bold")
.attr("transform", "translate(6,0)") //space
.text(dynamicText);
}
In general, I would like to be able to append/concatenate any number of string variables, each with distinct styles, in a way that "looks good" as a sentence, and can be centered. Please tell me there's a better way to do it.
Instead of using separate text elements, use one text element with two tspan elements nested inside. If you do not set separate positioning attributes on the tspan, they will naturally line up as one row of text.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/SVG/Element/tspan

Limiting text width does not work as expected if not inserting at the end of a line

I know we can use :set tw=80 to limit the text width. However, if we insert text before the end, this function doesn't work at all.
For example, let's say we type "Would you like to have responses to your questions sent to you via email?"
If we continue to input after "?", tw works fine. But if we insert before say "have", it doesn't break off the line even if it exceeds the specified text width.
Is there any way to make this work in the latter case?
You may try
:set fo+=a
which reformats your paragraph as you type.
See :h fo-table.
This might be configurable using formatoptions or formatexpr, but I'm not sure how.
Another solution is to manually format using gq on a visual line selection i.e. add a breakline if the text width is >= tw.
Type in whatever text you like inside another block of text, thus making it 80 chars or more in width
Select the text you think is misformatted using V (Shiftv)
gq
From :h gq:
Format the lines that {motion} moves over.
Formatting is done with one of three methods:
1. If 'formatexpr' is not empty the expression is
evaluated. This can differ for each buffer.
2. If 'formatprg' is not empty an external program
is used.
3. Otherwise formatting is done internally.
In the third case the 'textwidth' option controls the
length of each formatted line (see below).
If the 'textwidth' option is 0, the formatted line
length is the screen width (with a maximum width of
79).
The 'formatoptions' option controls the type of
formatting fo-table.
[..]
For more information on how Vim's textwidth works, take a look at
How to use Vim’s textwidth like a pro

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