Hi Danny, I will pass on your comments to Lew.
It would certainly sound logical for the underlined DP to have an underline output but even in XHTML the <u> is deprecated (but still available) in favour of using a style. So perhaps if there are application and scenarios using <i> it might be better to leave them alone. Actually on a more philosophical note, you rarely see underlines except for hyperlinked data, and the most common text decorations are either bold or italic. In terms of the expansion of the DP memo field, it might be a little too much for this version. I know Lew was joyous about dropping the bare <p> to represent two consecutive lines breaks as he has taken some things to the limit and saving that extra special character was a benefit to him. Regards Brian ----- Original Message ----- From: MEIRTE Danny To: [email protected] Sent: Wednesday, June 11, 2008 1:33 AM Subject: [Dataperf] new DP 2.Y Dear Lew (and all dp users), Nice to hear about a DP2.6 Y version on its way … (and even more for a DPWin version)! The problem with the underline and italics is that nowadays we actually need both. But if we have to choose, I would prefer italics (in biology and scientific references it is quite important). Maybe it is the moment to ADD italics as a third font-style (additional to bold <F6> in text edit, underline <F8> in text edit). I know this would imply a special color scheme to visualise them (and the range of combinations possible would increase from 5 to 9 …). Maybe <F4> in text edit can be used for keyboard input of italics (the WP4.2 tags are <178> <179>). If this is too complicated, one could also leave the option to translate the underline marks into italics or not at a higher level (at database STR or dp startup level). (the same way as it has been solved in DPSpool…) Suggestion for default settings: [ctrl-F3, 2] 1 - Menu Color: B H 2 - Editing Color: H A 3 - Bold Color: B P 4 - Underline Color: C O 5 - Italics Color: B D 6 - Bold & Underline: C P 7 - Bold & Italics: B L 8 - Italics & Underline: C D 9 - Bold, Italics & Underline: C L Note: The only missing “font-style/variant” is smallcaps. But as you probably know this is well supported in RTF but is not so ‘regular’ in HTML (only through styles… the ‘shortest’ HTML-output looks like: <span style=font-variant:small-caps> </span> ). (the total number of color combinations will be 17!, although SmallCaps is mostly a stand-alone or combined only with Bold; the <F2> in text edit can be used fpr keyboard input of smallcaps) (no WP4.2 tags known to me, but <144> <145> are used in my Printcodes) Remark: I do not use DP2.6X because I am working in a special multilingual codepage, where the translation from DOS (CP 437) to ISO Latin 1 is not appropriate. Please note that CP 437 (US), CP 850 (Multilingual) and CP 852 (Slavic) are quite different e.g. in character code 252: the n-superscript in CP 437, the 2-superscript in CP 850 and r-hacek in CP 852. In Europe the euro symbol € is needed as currency output char(238) in CP 437, so CP850 changed into CP858, by dropping the dotless-i; CP 852 is still without euro symbol… (char(238) is t-cedilla). The ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1) does not hold the euro symbol, it is adapted to the ISO 8859-15 or Latin 9 that holds the euro symbol as char(164)… In HTML pages the euro symbol can be encoded using SGML character references as € or using Unicode € I would also suggest to make the ;;W translation of each character adaptable/programmable by the user: I would hope for a similar interface as the Printer Map interface [Ctrl-F3; 6] but allowing 4 bytes in the output (this is the maximum length for a character in UTF-8), or 9 bytes for HTML-code using Unicode [e.g. male symbol: ♂ and female ♀), or 10 bytes for SGML character references (longest I found 10 bytes ϑ same as ϑ in ISO Latin 1 the longest are 8 characters long e.g. ± same as ±) Of course, it would be even more flexible to have the ;;U (for UTF-8) and ;;W (for HTML-code) as separate output format suffixes, each using their own translation table… Please note that the Microsoft CP 1252 ("Windows Latin-1") is not the same as the Official ISO Latin-1. In real ISO Latin-1, character codes in the range 127-159 are undefined. Microsoft has assigned these undefined codes to glyphs listed on their codepage CP 1252. It is recommended to use Unicode UTF-8 for encoding symbols that are not in the 7-bit ASCII set, as it is the same across all platforms and operating systems that support it. For XML UTF-8 is the standard encoding! __________________________________________ Just as it might be a lucky moment for us all… Some (old) wishes (suggestions are for DP2.6, I use DP2.6f for the moment, but I checked my problems using DP2.6X): 1) Is it possible to fix the bug that during reports the “Please Wait” and “Network Busy” messages would restore the cursor position on the screen properly? 2) A second problem (memory allocation bug?) to fix: when using a calculated (virtual) field for retrieving a record through a record link using [F5], the first multiline alphanumeric memo type field (not even used in the calculation) gets corrupted… [Probably I have to document this in more detail]. 3) Maybe the record counter during search (now resetting at 65k) could be adapted. 4) suggestion: show fieldnames (as in search) in the Edit/Create import list [Ctrl-F5, 7] 5) suggestion: allow inverse indexing (showing highest first) in a panellink and in subreports as it is possible in the main report (sort direction: backward) and probably also in a Related Records Window (could be indicated by using a negative value for the link description in the STE format) 6) hoping for some trigonomial functions, the most needed are: sin[number] for sinus with number in radians and atn[number] for arctangent in radians 7) the solution for the complex calculations in my database [now using up many panellinks]: a lookup through an existing index (indicated by a panelnumber and a filenumber) not with a fixed panellink but using variables,… suggestion: lookup[panelnumber;indexnumber;indexvalue;n] (a negative indexnumber would inverse the query – see (5)-); n indicates the field to return (similar to user.field[n]); an other way could be FIND[P1F4P2F3;indexvalue] where P2 is the panelnumber P1F4 is the panellink using indexnumber and F3 corresponds with n) –the latter format is not quite DP-like- 8) trespassing the 78 character limit for SUBFIELD and SUBSTRING (at least when used in report variables). 9) for SUBFIELD: syntax for using linefeed, bold, underline (and italic!) codes for parsing 10) a function to be used inside a formula allowing to put text to bold, underline (and italic). suggestion: functions cat.b[ ], cat.u[ ] (and cat.i[ ]) same as cat.c[ ] but resulting text will be bold, underlined resp. in italics. And why not: a cat.n[ ] to strip off all these codes and leaving only linefeeds… 11) for template search on a memo field: a way to look for linefeed, bold, underlined, (italics,) … [might be the same solution as for (9)!] I hope I contributed something… Danny Danny Meirte curator Herpetology Royal Museum for Central Africa Department of African Zoology Vertebrate Section Leuvensesteenweg 13 3080 Tervuren, Belgium Tel.: +32 2 769 56 29 Fax : +32 2 769 56 42 or +32 2 767 02 ########################################### This message has been scanned by ICT - Africa Museum ________________________________________ 10/6/2008 - Filtered through antispam by ICT ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Dataperf mailing list [email protected] http://lists.dataperfect.nl/mailman/listinfo/dataperf
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