Hi Tim,
On Jan 4, 2009, at 7:54 PM, Tim Kilburn wrote:
Hi Will,
You asked: if i am in text edit is there a way i can highlight from
where my cursor is now,
TK: Check out http://homepage.mac.com/kilburns/voiceover/textedit.html
for instructions on this. Use VO-cmd-h to navigate to the heading
on Selecting Text and it should all be there for you. There are
also many more hints on the use of TextEdit.
As always, great job summarizing the VoiceOver selection options in
your TextEdit pages. In the section on Selecting Text I'd also add a
note that you can fine tune your selection with the shift selection
commands by issuing additional selection commands that modify and
"unhighlight" your original selection. For example, if you want to
select everything from your present position through to the end of the
document, except for the last two words, you can use Command-Shift-
Down Arrow, and then press Option-Shift-Left Arrow twice to "back off"
and remove the last two words from your selection. You'll hear these
two selections as "unhighlighted". Use VO-F6 to check your highlighted
text.
Another Cocoa shortcut I sometimes use in addition to the ones you've
listed for TextEdit is Control-V to move down by pages and Control-
Shift-V to select next page. This can be a convenient unit of
selection/navigation in longer text documents when you want to use
something longer than paragraphs or lines, but you don't want to move
to the end of the document. Here I believe that the "page" is the text
visible within the window, so the amount of selected text depends on
the size of the TextEdit window and the size of the text font being
used. (This is roughly like using VO-Shift-W to read the contents of
the window while using Control-V to page through the document -- the
selections are made in window-sized blocks.) Anyway, with this
combination I can, for example, select four "pages" of text from my
current position in the file by holding down the Control and Shift
keys and pressing the "V" key four times. Then I can use additional
selection commands to "unhighlight" by dropping lines, words, etc.
from the end of my selection. Using VO-F6 to check what is
highlighted, and also remembering that command-z will "undo" actions
if you inadvertently pressed keys that started to replace that large
section of selected text before you could copy it (Command-C), helps a
lot in experimenting with TextEdit selections.
A few other miscellaneous comments for your TextEdit page:
(1) The command to set a VoiceOver Bookmark at the VoiceOver cursor
location (with VO-Keys+Shift+1) and then jump back to it (VO-Keys+1)
is actually Leopard specific, since it uses hot spots. You can set
multiple bookmarks within the same document (VO-Keys+Shift+2, etc.),
subject to the limits of hot spots (maximum of 10; should remain
active as long as you don't restart VoiceOver). You need to switch the
definitions for setting and jumping back (there's a typo in that VO-
keys+Shift+1 is currently associated with jumping to the bookmark
instead of setting the bookmark on your page). You might also want to
note that you need to press the number keys at the top of the keyboard
when assigning the hot spots, since at least one list reader ran into
problems because of trying to use the number keys on the number pad
for hot spot assignments.
(2) VO-T to check text attributes is also Leopard specific. I believe
that everything else on the current TextEdit page (apart from the 3
lines describing setting and navigating to hot spot bookmarks, and
using VO-T to check text attributes such as font type, size, and
color) works for both Tiger and Leopard, so you can use the same page
in your links to Tiger and Leopard apps with that notation.
(3) Cara gave a great description of how to select color for fonts in
TextEdit. It will pop up if you do a search with the terms:
from:"Cara" TextEdit color
but here's the direct link to Cara's post on accessible font color
selection with TextEdit from the archives:
http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg45614.html
(4) Tabs can be set in TextEdit as you describe, by interacting with
the Ruler. But that is only the case for working in RTF (Rich Text
Format). Now admittedly, anybody who is using Word documents or who is
still closely tied to Windows will likely be using Rich Text rather
than Plain Text, but linux users will likely want Plain Text. In plain
text mode my tabs seem set to indent 8 characters. Keeping track of
tab indentation for programming purposes has been discussed a number
of times, but most recently, both Rafael and Jacob summarized that you
can have VoiceOver keep track of tabs if you set punctuation level to
all in the verbosity settings under VoiceOver Utility, and you can
also set repeated punctuation to count occurrences.
HTH
Cheers,
Esther
