how to simplify use of charmap

[Nifrabar]

To enable my users to simply use special characters I have a menu-option which fires charmap.
But using charmap is a bit devious.

Any thoughts to get a solution like in eg Word?

-Bart

 

[TamarGranor]

You could build your own CharMap-like form, using buttons for the various characters. But I suspect such a thing would be pretty slow.

Are there particular characters your users are likely to need? If it's a small set, why not just set up a menu for those with hotkeys, and then train them on the hotkeys. Then they'd only need CharMap for the unusual ones.

Tamar

 

[foxmuldr3]

How complex are you wanting it to be? I can think of a dozen different ways to do it. One of the easiest might be to monitor the clipboard using a timer, and when its contents change, save that to a "recently used" list which you can display to them as icons. You may need to write some code to read the charmap control which has the specified font to see what the current font is, or prompt the user.

By intercepting the clipboard you can save the binary contents to a binary memory, and then restore later for use as a shortcut of the 10 most recently used list.

Best regards,
Rick C. Hodgin

 

[Nifrabar]

Tamar and Rick,
The idea behind was to use just simple solution as charmap but then esier to use like eg in Word
-Bart

 

[Mike Lewis]

Bart,

Are you referring to the Inert / Symbol / Special Character command in Word? Where you've got keyboard shortcuts for symbols like copyright and paragraph mark?

If so, then why not add a right-click menu to your base edit box (or text box) class? The menu could have a bar for each of the special characters that you want to support, each with a keyboard shortcut. So, the user can simply right-click and choose the symbol they want to insert. Once they get familiar with the system, they can just type the shortcut.

If that's not the sort of thing you are looking for, perhaps you could describe what you want in more detail.

Mike

__________________________________
Mike Lewis (Edinburgh, Scotland)

Visual FoxPro articles, tips, training, consultancy

 

[Olaf Doschke]

Tamar, the idea is doable eg also as a toolbar. With just a few special chars it should be quite fast. All the button click needs, essentially is KEYBOARD(This.Caption) and then set the button caption to the key you want to emulate. That would even work with such special meaning keys as F1. And as touch keyboard on touchscreens.

wOOdy has done that here:

http://archive.msdn.microsoft.com/FoxPro/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=3800

Bye, Olaf.

 

[Dan Freeman]

Are you referring to the Inert / Symbol / Special Character command in Word? Where you've got keyboard shortcuts for symbols like copyright and paragraph mark?

Note that a lot of those Word keyboard shortcuts are actually implemented in Word's equivalent of intellisense.

Since we can implement runtime intellisense in VFP, we should be able to do the same thing. There wouldn't be any visual representation, but you should be able to make the same keystrokes work.

 

[Mike Lewis]

Since we can implement runtime intellisense in VFP, we should be able to do the same thing.

But we can only do runtime Intellisense for the native memo editor, not for textboxes and edit boxes (at least, I think that's true).

Mike



__________________________________
Mike Lewis (Edinburgh, Scotland)

Visual FoxPro articles, tips, training, consultancy