How to handle big chunks of text - xamarin

Until now I have used
<Label Text="Some Text"</Label>
to present text for the user. However, I was wondering if this is the correct way to render big premade text strings with bullets etc. or if there is another, more neat way to do it?

I have used a WebView in the past with a transparent background. That allows as much markup as needed and is fairly easy to do. Though I have also just used a simple Label and added a bunch of \n's and \t's to make it look like a formatted document. I think it depends on your preference, the layout you are putting the element in, and if the text will be dynamically pulled or not.
There are also markdown plugins you can add that will format mark down text so thats another option. Something like this (I have not tried this plugin myself btw).

Related

macOS using html tags in nstextfield

Im wondering is there any ways to make this possible:
I have a nstextfield(or nstextview). And I also have one button, clicking on that should activate Bold mode for selected text, or the text that would written further.
First idea I had - is to use attributes for characters that would be written further, but this idea is not so good, as I would need to save that string in file later. I can save attributed string, but this gives me not proper format, what I would like to see is kind of or smth like that.
If I understand correctly your "First idea" is correct. Within your program you use NSAttributedString to add bold etc. your text. When you wish to save the text you can convert to HTML, or a number of other formats, and reading these formats and converting back to NSAttributed is also supported. A good place to start is Formatted Documents and Attributed Strings.

Wordpress theme/image management

So I've been creating a custom responsive theme in Wordpress and I've hit a wall when it comes to image management. I'd like to style images in a way that wordpress doesn't seem to inherently support - I'm looking for something like this:
with the images added via the regular wordpress media management pane, and inserted into posts/pages. The images should be out of the flow of the content but accurately placed next to the correct headers/text blocks. Most importantly, the images ought to collapse into a column with the rest of the content at the correct media query breakpoints.
Here's what I've tried, from worst to best:
Hard coded images in template files
Obviously the worst option. Not portable, requires a lot of meddling, and would be almost impossible to align the images with the correct content. Also, no real way of making the images responsive with the content.
Use the default image styling and abandon the idea of pulling the images out of the regular flow
Non optimal, but it would allow anyone to change/edit images easily.
Remove images from the results of the_content(), then place and style them separate.
Portable, but has the same problems as #1 - difficult to align the images with content and keep responsiveness.
Use the featured image on pages that only require one image
Pretty good option for pages that need ONLY one image, but there is no easy way to make the featured image an arbitrary size/aspect ratio.
Use markup in the editor to correctly layout the images
Requires anyone editing the posts/pages to have some knowledge of the underlying theme. This seems to work the best, but it isn't portable (might break stuff on theme change).
While I've had the best results with this option, it seems sort of antithetical to using a cms/wysiwyg editor in the first place.
My question is whether or not the last option really is the best to get the result I want?
In the end, the answer was clearly custom fields, and none of the other options I listed. With the advanced custom fields plugin, it becomes a breeze to do what I wanted. You don't need the plugin, but it makes image management a whole lot easier, as it fully integrates the wordpress media library with the custom field (which you would have to do manually otherwise). With the plugin, custom fields meet all of my needs (responsiveness, portability, and ease of use for the technically challenged).

CKEditor 4 uses separate span tags for each formatting action

I've been searching through a large number of CKEditor posts and have yet to find a targeted answer to this question. I know CKEditor is very configurable (which I haven't leveraged yet.)
For every formatting action performed, CKEditor wraps it in a separate span tag. So if I 1) change the font to Arial 2) change the size to 36px 3) change the color, I end up with this HTML which seems unnecessarily verbose.
<p><span style="color:#DAA520"><span style="font-size:36px"><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">Hi</span></span></span></p>
I would rather it just did something like <p style="..styles list">Hi</p>
My question: Is this configurable (and how), and/or is there a rationale for them doing it this way where I should just accept the behavior?
It certainly seems like a relatively clean means of implementation on CK Editor's part, and would help it avoid conflicting logic for different styles applied to dissimilar spans.
If you as the user want consistent differences with multiple variables like size, color, or font, you should really be using classes, I would think. A WYSIWYG editor like CK is designed to implement HTML code that is readable, not pretty. If you want more elegant code, you probably need to write it yourself.
Since other adaptations from WYSIWYG editors/ word processors generate obscene looking code, e.g. Microsoft Word/ Outlook, or Adobe's new CSS from layout feature, this span output isn't actually too bad.

Cocoa: Creating a Custom Text View

In a nutshell, I don't want raw text, or even rich text. I want to load an xml document, which has metadata for sections of text, and I want to display that metadata in a drawer when I click on a given text section. A hyperlink is a good example; obviously trivial to do in a web app, but while I'm not that experienced with mac dev, I can't seem to find an easy way to accomplish this with cocoa.
Any suggestions as to general strategy? There doesn't seem to be an HTML view built in to Interface builder or I'd mess with that.
I'm not entirely clear on what you're trying to do. It sounds like you want to load an XML document, display the text, and display various metadata when certain bits of text are selected.
If that's the case, you should read about the Cocoa Text System. The NSTextStorage class is a subclass of NSMutableAttributedString, and you can apply arbitrary attributes to any range of text. When the selection changes, you can get the attributes in the selected range and use that to update your drawer. (By the way, drawers are really on their way out. I'd suggest a different user interface. NSSplitView-based interfaces are much more in vogue these days.)
Of course, to build up the NSTextStorage, you'd need to parse the XML with NSXMLDocument or NSXMLParser, but you'd get much more control and it would look more "Cocoa-like".
You could use a WebView, which is the Safari renderer, but I think you'd have a hard time getting it to display text the way you want. Safari has never been great at rendering XML without XSLT.

PDF generation under ruby - block should not cut by page separator

My PDF consists of a number of blocks (actually, a list of quotations), they go one after another till the end of the document. If the text of a quotation
does not fit on the page, the whole quotation should start from the top of the next page, instead of being torn apart. How can I implement that on any library under ruby?
Try PrinceXML - this is a standalone executable that generates PDF out of HTML or XML. It supports a lot of special CSS properties that will even help you to control page breaks. Refer to http://www.princexml.com/doc/6.0/page-breaks/
This application is available for windows and linux. I was using it for generation of a pretty complicated PDF documents with headers and footers on every page except first one. And since you don't need to output a PDF with precise positioning of elements, it might be a perfect solution for you.
I haven't tried it, but in Prawn I would try using either the Document#text_box method or looking up the table methods and putting your text in cells with invisible borders. The documentation's unclear on how page break functionality fits in with the bounding box models, but it's worth a shot.
HTMLDoc which converts HTML to PDF has a page break facility.

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