Is it possible to add custom autonumbering lists in InDesign - adobe-indesign

InDesign CC comes with a set of pre-defined autonumbering lists:
a. b. c.
0001, 0002, 0003.... etc.
Is there a way to add a custom autonumbering list such as Cyrillic letters or custom numbering such as 000001?
InDesign MiddleEastern version does add Hebrew and Arabic numbering systems and Japanese version adds Chinese and Japanese numbering systems but nothing is customizable.
For that matter InDesign's Object Reference only mentions the lists I mention above.
Any answers to that?

Related

transform a svg into a copy/paste-able emoticon like this one 🦄

Not sure if SO is the best place for this question, but don't know where else to ask.
Is there any way to transform a svg like this one for ex: (https://svgsilh.com/image/1775543.html) into something that i can use inside an editor with copy/paste like this one? 🦄
No, because the unicorn emoticon is one example of a character. And just as with letters, digits, and punctuation, the appearance of emoticons and other plain-text symbols is decided by fonts.
LSerni wrote the following:
The reason you can "copy and paste" that icon is that the icon already has a UTF-8 code and your editor is UTF-8 aware. And this is why the same emoticon is slightly different between Apple, Android and so on: it's because it's always code XYZ, but code XYZ is rendered with different icons on different platforms.
But that's not entirely correct. The difference in rendering lies more in the font than in the operating system that displays emoticons. Unless the font supplies its own version of a symbol, that symbol will usually be supplied by the font specified by default by the operating system, and different operating systems supply different symbol fonts.

Italic and bold Latin, and Greek letters using custom unicode font in gnuplot to produce (e)ps or pdf

I would like to create a postscript or pdf figure with enhanced notations, italic or bold Latin characters, and sometimes (regular) Greek characters. How to do that in general?
Let's say I downloaded CMU Sans Serif, a font that has glyphs for all the strange characters I ever want to use. I converted them to pfa with an online tool and copied the files to the path of working directory.
Expectations
Let's say I'd like to produce the following notation somewhere.
What I tried: original
I create a gnuplot script encoded in a utf-8 file (without BOM) with the content
set term postscript eps enhanced "CMUSansSerif" 15 fontfile add 'CMUSansSerif.pfa' fontfile add 'CMUSansSerif-Oblique.pfa' fontfile add 'CMUSansSerif-Bold.pfa'
set encoding utf8
set o "print.eps"
p x t "Label: {/CMUSansSerif-Bold important }{/CMUSansSerif-Oblique note}: ∫⟨α₂ + β²⟩ = äßű"
set o
and executed with the newest gnuplot, version 5.2.6.
What I got
I used a vector graphics editor to open the eps file and relevant part looks like this:
What I also tried
According to Ethan's answer I added adobeglyphnames to the termoptions. It made at least the letters available but other Unicode symbols are still unavailable. The result is:
Question
What went wrong? How could I produce the desired output?
So many possibilities, where things can go wrong: Is the font not suitable for this task? Did I download a wrong version of it? Did the pfa converter do a bad job? Did I include the font files incorrectly? Was there something wrong with the set encoding? Do I use a bad vector graphics editor? Do I have wrong fonts installed and the vector graphics editor tries to use them?
I am afraid that the answer is that in general PostScript is the wrong tool for this. If it is at all possible for you to work with PDF output instead, I suggest you do that. It is even possible the resulting PDF file can be translated to a PostScript file by standard tools (e.g. pdf2ps). That is likely to work if the non-ascii characters are limited to Greek and other relatively common symbols but I don't know how much of the full unicode tables are covered by those standard tools.
If you really need to produce PostScript with additional unicode characters directly from gnuplot, you can find full instructions and sample character encoding tables in the gnuplot distribution files:
.../term/PostScript/unicode_maps.README
.../term/PostScript/unicode_big.map
.../term/PostScript/unicode_small.map
I am not familiar with the online tool font conversion you used but probably it failed because it did not have, or at any rate did not use, suitable character encoding tables for the desired conversion.
===
One other thought. There are two ways that a *.pfa font can encode unicode characters that are common enough to have a name assigned by Adobe for use in PostScript. (1) It may use generic names like uni0439 for Unicode code points. (2) It may use Adobe-specific names from the list here:
agl-aglfn glyph list
When selecting PostScript output from gnuplot you can tell it which of these two conventions is used by the font you provide. The default is "noadobeglyphnames".
set term postscript {no}adobeglyphnames
==
(recipe for using "set term pdfcairo")
Font handling is unfortunately system-specific, so I cannot tell you how to install or configure fonts on all your target machines. I will show you a procedure that works on a linux desktop that uses the fontconfig utilities for system font handling.
Create directory /home/share/fonts/CMUSans
Add this directory to the search list in file /etc/fonts/local.conf
Copy *.ttf files into this directory from the CMU Sans Serif zip archive you link to in your original query. The system fontconfig system tools should now be able to find these fonts. By inspection they self-report as "CMU Sans Serif"
in gnuplot (tested with version 5.2.6)
set term pdfcairo font "CMU Sans Serif,15"
set output 'enhanced_utf8.pdf'
load 'enhanced_utf8.dem'
convert output pdf file to PostScript with the following command
pdf2ps enhanced_utf8.pdf enhanced_utf8.ps
Screenshot of the result is shown below
It seems that CMU Sans Serif doesn't contain the UTF-8 characters you are asking for. Check the font with a font editor like Birdfont. Although the webpage shows symbols you want to use, the font itself does not contain them. However, your browser may show symbols, but they are just fallback representations from other fonts.

how to generate pdf in arabic from oracle report builder 6i?

dear all I need to create an oracle report (v 6i) in which I have display one paragraph in English and another one paragraph in Arabic. The text can be static(hardcoded) or can be dynamic (can be selected from the table). I have copied an Arabic paragraph from ms word & pasted it in a table through toad. When I see the inserted text through toad/SQL plus is displays it in Arabic, but when I am displaying it through Oracle reports it displays some junk characters.
Go to Paper layout editor; in there, set Arabic text font to the one that supports Arabic alphabet. If it is, for example, Arial (by default), it can't show Arabic letters so you'll get junk as Reports will try to perform font substitution (and fail). I don't know which fonts support Arabic language, I don't use it.
Also, note that Reports 6i is a client-server version which means that you'll have to install that font on all computers which will be using that report (otherwise all users will see junk as well).

Display of Asian characters (with Unicode): Difference in character spacing when presented in a RichEdit control compared with using ExtTextOut

This picture illustrates my predicament:
All of the characters appear to be the same size, but the space between them is different when presented in a RichEdit control compared with when I use ExtTextOut.
I would like to present the characters the same as in the RichEdit control (ideally), in order to preserve wrap positions.
Can anyone tell me:
a) Which is the more correct representation?
b) Why the RichEdit control displays the text with no gaps between the Asian Characters?
c) Is there any way to make ExtTextOut reproduce the behaviour of the RichEdit control when drawing these characters?
d) Would this be any different if I was working on an Asian version of Windows?
Perhaps I'm being optimistic, but if anyone has any hints to offer, I'd be very interested to hear.
In case it helps:
Here's my text:
快的棕色狐狸跳在懶惰狗1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0
apologies to Asian readers, this is merely for testing our Unicode implemetation and I don't even know what language the characters are taken from, let alone whether they mean anything
In order to view the effect by pasting these characters into a RichEdit control (eg. Wordpad), you may find you have to swipe them and set the font to 'Arial'.
The rich text that I obtain is:
{\rtf1\ansi\ansicpg1252\deff0\deflang2057{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil\fcharset0 Arial;}}{\colortbl ;\red0\green0\blue0;}\viewkind4\uc1\pard\sa200\sl276\slmult1\lang9\fs22\u24555?\u30340?\u26837?\u33394?\u29392?\u29432?\u36339?\u22312?\u25078?\u24816?\u29399?1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0\par\pard\'a3 $$ \'80\'80\cf1\lang2057\fs16\par}
It doesn't appear to contain a value for character 'pitch' which was my first thought.
I don't know the answer, but there are several things to suspect:
There are several versions of the rich edit control. Perhaps you're using an older one that doesn't have all the latest typographic improvements.
There are many styles and flags that affect the behavior of a rich editcontrol, so you might want to explore which ones are set and what they do. For example, look at EM_GETEDITSTYLE.
Many Asian fonts come in two versions on Windows. One is optimized for horizontal layout, and the other for vertical layout. That latter usually has the same name, but has # prepended to it. Perhaps you are using the wrong one in the rich edit control.
UPDATE: By messing around with Wordpad, I was able to reproduce the problem with the crowded text in the rich edit control.
Open a new document in Wordpad on Windows 7. Note that the selected font is Calibri.
Paste the sample text into the document.
Text appears correct, but Wordpad changed the font to SimSun.
Select the text and change the font back to Calibri or Arial.
The text will now be overcrowded, very similar to your example. Thus it appears the fundamental problem is with font linking and fallback. ExtTextOut is probably selecting an appropriate font for the script automatically. Your challenge is to figure out how to identify the right font for the script and set that font in the rich edit control.
This will only help with part of your problem, but there is a way to draw text to a DC that will look exactly the same as it does with RichEdit: what's called the windowless RichEdit control. It not exactly easy to use: I wrote a CodeProject article on it a few years back. I used this to solve the problem of a scrollable display of blocks of text, each one of which can be edited by clicking on it: the normal drawing is done with the windowless RichEdit, and the editing by showing a "real" RichEdit control on the top of it.
That would at least get you the text looking the same in both cases, though unfortunately both cases would show too little character spacing.
One further thought: if you could rely on Microsoft Office being installed, you could also try later versions of RichEdit that come with office. There's more about these on Murray Sargent's blog, as well as some interesting articles on font binding that might also help.
ExtTextOut allows you to specify the logical spacing between records. It has the parameter lpDx which is a const pointer to an array of values that indicate the distance between origins of adjacent character cells. The Microsoft API documentation notes that if you don't set it, then it sets it's own default spacing. I would have to say that's why ExtTextOut is working fine.
In particular, when you construct a EMR_EXTTEXTOUTW record in EMF, it populates an EMR_TEXT structure with this DX array - which looking at one of your comments, allowed the RichEdit to insert the EMF with the information contained in the record, whereby if you didn't set a font binding then the RTF record does some matching to work out what font to use.
In terms of the RichEdit control, the following article might be useful:
Use Font Binding in a Rich Edit Control
After character sets are assigned, Rich Edit scans the text around the
insertion point forward and backward to find the nearest fonts that
have been used for the character sets. If no font is found for a
character set, Rich Edit uses the font chosen by the client for that
character set. If the client hasn't specified a font for the character
set, Rich Edit uses the default font for that character set. If the
client wants some other font, the client can always change it, but
this approach will work most of the time. The current default font
choices are based on the following table. Note that the default fonts
are set per-process, and there are separate lists for UI usage and for
non-UI usage.
If you haven't set the characterset, then it further explains that it falls back to ANSI_CHARSET. However, it's most definitely a lot more complicated than that, as that blog article by Murray Sargent (a programmer at Microsoft) shows.

How can I change the background color of specific characters in a RTF document?

I'm trying to output RTF (Rich Text Format) from a Ruby program - and I'd prefer to just emit RTF directly without using the RTF gem as I'm doing pretty simple stuff.
I would like to highlight specific characters in a DNA sequence alignment and from the docs it seems that I can either use \highlightN ... \highlight0 or \cbN ... \cb1
The problem is that I cannot get \cb to work in either Word:Mac 2008 or Mac TextEdit (\cf works fine so I know it's not a color table issue)
\highlight does work but seemingly only with two of the possible colors (black and red) and \highlight does not use the custom color table.
By creating simple docs in Word with character shading and saving as RTF I can see blocks of ridiculously verbose RTF code that presumably does what I want, but it is so impenetrable that I'm not seeing the wood for the trees.
Part of the problem may well be that Mac Word is just not implementing RTF properly. I don't have a Windows version of Word handy.
Anyone know the right way to shade blocks of text?
Thanks
--Rob
There is a note in the RTF Pocket Guide that says MS Word does not implement the \cb command. It says MS Word uses \chshdng0\chcbpatN (where "N" is the color number that you would use with \cb). The book recommends using something like the following for compatibility with programs that implement \cbN and/or \chshdng0\chcbpatN: {\chshdng0\chcbpat5\cb5 text}.
Note: The copy of the book I have was published in 2003, so it might be a bit out-of-date.
The sequence of RTF commands that seems to be most universally supported by RTF-capable applications is:
\chshdng10000\chcbpatN\chcfpatN\cbN
These commands:
set the shading to 100 percent
set the pattern foreground and background colors to the color from the color table (we're not actually specifying a shading pattern)
set the character background to the color from the color table
Word was the most difficult application to properly render background colors in:
Despite what the latest (1.9.1) RTF spec says, Word 2013 does not resolve \highlightN colors from the \colortbl. Instead, \highlightN maps to a predefined list of colors. It looks like those colors come from the 1.5 version of the RTF spec.
Regarding \cb, the 1.9.1 spec contains this helpful pointer at the end of the section on Color Table:
Note: Windows versions of Word have never supported \cbN, but it can be emulated by the control word sequence \chshdng0\chcbpatN.
This is almost a useful suggestion, except that if you read the documentation for \chshdngN:
Character shading. The N argument is a value representing the shading of the text in hundredths of a percent.
So, 0 turns out to not be a very useful value; 100 / 0.01 gives us the 10000 we used in the sequence above.
Use WordPad to create RTF documents, not Word. WordPad creates much simpler documents, i.e. approaching human-readable.
I use WordPad every time I need to display formatted text in a WinForms application, and need something that the RichTextBox control can handle being assigned to its Rtf parameter.

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