What column setting do you use in the IDE for the vertical edge. I use 80 columns in line mode, but I wanted to know if this is common or is there a more common standard? I have seen other options like background mode, but found it too distracting.
Vertical Edge, for those who are unfamiliar, is a line or an area which marks off the section where the code can be written. Anything beyond may not format the best way in other code readers or makes code readability tougher. Please correct if my understanding is inaccurate.
Widescreen monitors and a preference for a smaller font so I get more vertical lines makes 80 a little lacking on the wide side.
I don't have a vertical column setting. Any coding lines (usually ifs) that may be too wide, I split at logical operators. For text lines, its a bit more nebulous where I actually split them but split them conservative.
Note: Your question appears to be the same as: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/903754/do-you-still-limit-line-length-in-code and question 746853 (which I can't hyperlink to as I am a "new user")
Related
I am writing a vba macro that checks that word documents are formatted correctly to meet certain specifications. One of the things I have to check for are the left margins of each line - different paragraphs are supposed to have different first indents and hanging indents depending on the context. This should be as simple as checking the style, but unfortunately it is not - some of the documents use styles to change the indents, but others use manual spaces and tabs to position the text correctly. So I need some way to check the actual physical position of the first physical character in each Document.Paragraphs. I have no problem getting a range with the first visible character in the paragraph, but I'm not sure about getting the distance from the margin (or from the left side of the page - doesn't make a difference because the margins are consistent).
I found the Window.GetPoint method, but I'm nervous to use it, because that is based on the actual physical location on the screen. This macro is going to be used on different computers, with different versions of word, and I'm not sure about how it is affected by other view settings (like print layout, zoom, etc.) Is there a consistent way to use this method to determine the distance from the margin?
The other method would be (because all of the documents are in Courier New 12) to look at the firstindent property of the style, and the count manually all of the spaces and tabs (but that would need to take into account tabstops). This I'm also not sure how to do.
I would think that there should be a much simpler way of doing this, but I can't find it, so if anyone has any suggestions I would really appreciate any help.
It was there after all! Range.Information(wdHorizontalPositionRelativeToPage)
In Delphi 7 IDE, do the lines need to be a given length? I see a gray line in some Delphi code I'm working with, and it looks like ever line ends right before it.
It's called the right margin. It is intended as a guide to help you avoid writing lines that are too long and exceed your coding standards. You can switch it off from the Editor Options, as I have done here:
It's just a guide to line length. Some people don't like long lines because they can be hard to read on different resolutions or when doing comparisons.
That gray line is called the margin.
You can set its visibility and position in the Editor Properties at the Display tab in the Margin and gutter groupbox.
The margin is a visual assistent. The standard position is 80 characters, which defaults to the maximum unscrolled size of many source formatting output media, such as the one used here at Stack Overflow. Originally, it had something to do with the paper width on (matrix) printers. Maybe it still does.
What was the original historical use of the vertical tab character (\v in the C language, ASCII 11)?
Did it ever have a key on a keyboard? How did someone generate it?
Is there any language or system still in use today where the vertical tab character does something interesting and useful?
Vertical tab was used to speed up printer vertical movement. Some printers used special tab belts with various tab spots. This helped align content on forms. VT to header space, fill in header, VT to body area, fill in lines, VT to form footer. Generally it was coded in the program as a character constant. From the keyboard, it would be CTRL-K.
I don't believe anyone would have a reason to use it any more. Most forms are generated in a printer control language like postscript.
#Talvi Wilson noted it used in python '\v'.
print("hello\vworld")
Output:
hello
world
The above output appears to result in the default vertical size being one line. I have tested with perl "\013" and the same output occurs. This could be used to do line feed without a carriage return on devices with convert linefeed to carriage-return + linefeed.
Microsoft Word uses VT as a line separator in order to distinguish it from the normal new line function, which is used as a paragraph separator.
In the medical industry, VT is used as the start of frame character in the MLLP/LLP/HLLP protocols that are used to frame HL-7 data, which has been a standard for medical exchange since the late 80s and is still in wide use.
It was used during the typewriter era to move down a page to the next vertical stop, typically spaced 6 lines apart (much the same way horizontal tabs move along a line by 8 characters).
In modern day settings, the vt is of very little, if any, significance.
The ASCII vertical tab (\x0B)is still used in some databases and file formats as a new line WITHIN a field. For example:
In the .mer file format to allow new lines within a data field,
FileMaker databases can use vertical tabs as a linefeed (see https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/kb/59096).
I have found that the VT char is used in pptx text boxes at the end of each line shown in the box in oder to adjust the text to the size of the box.
It seems to be automatically generated by powerpoint (not introduced by the user) in order to move the text to the next line and fix the complete text block to the text box. In the example below, in the position of §:
"This is a text §
inside a text box"
A vertical tab was the opposite of a line feed i.e. it went upwards by one line. It had nothing to do with tab positions. If you want to prove this, try it on an RS232 terminal.
similar to R0byn's experience, i was experimenting with a Powerpoint slide presentation and dumped out the main body of text on the slide, finding that all the places where one would typically find carriage return (ASCII 13/0x0d/^M) or line feed/new line (ASCII 10/0x0a/^J) characters, it uses vertical tab (ASCII 11/0x0b/^K) instead, presumably for the exact reason that dan04 described above for Word: to serve as a "newline" while staying within the same paragraph. good question though as i totally thought this character would be as useless as a teletype terminal today.
I believe it's still being used, not sure exactly. There might be even a key combination of it.
As English is written Left to Right, Arabic Right to Left, there are languages in world that are also written top to bottom. In that case a vertical tab might be useful same as the horizontal tab is used for English text.
I tried searching, but couldn't find anything useful yet.
How can I fully justify a block of text (like MS Word does, not only on the right and not only on the left but on both sides)?
I want to justify some texts (mainly arabic text) adjusted to certain screen size (some handheld device screen actually, and its text viewer doesn't have this function) and save this text as justified. So I can reload and reuse it again elsewhere.
(The problem with MS word is, that if you copy the justified text from MS Word and paste it to another editor it'll copy it un-justified).
Update : for now I'm thinking of doing it like this:
get-a-word
get-word-width
add-word-to-total-Word and add-Word-width-to-total-word-width
check if total-Word-width = myscreen-width then continue
else if total-Word-width is between myscree-wdith and (myscreen-width -3) then
add-spaces-To-total-word until it = myscreen-width
This is what I'm thinking now, but I put this question up and hope to see if there is a better solution, or somebody else already implemented it.
PS: I hope I have made my question clear and I'm sorry for bad expression if there is.
edit1 : changed the title to make it more clear.
If you want to justify plain text, you can only add extra spaces to the lines to get them align on the left and right. Unfortunately the character widths differ in fonts; so doing it this way will only work for a certain font, unless you limit yourself to monospaced fonts where all characters have the same size.
If you want a result like in Word, adding spaces won't cut it. Word will not add spaces, but stretch and shrink the existing spaces. This information is lost when you copy and paste it into another app.
Either way, justifying is an optimization problem. If you are interested in a good solution and its implementation: have a look a TeX. For an implementation that works on plain text with monospaced fonts have a look at par
There are some API calls that may help:
ExtTextOut and GetCharacterPlacement
Look at the GCP_JUSTIFY flag for GetCharacterPlacement
ExtTextOut is used by Canvas.TextRect
The problem you are going to face is always going to be differences in the rendering of the font. Word handles full justification by adjusting kerning as well as adjusting the number of pixels between words by a few (either way). The end result is lined up both margins. This pixel adjustment is done BOTH ways, and as evenly as possible.
To properly handle this in your portable device you will have to also perform the same algorithm for the display of the text there.
If this is not possible, then the ONLY way you can even get somewhat close would be to add whitespace between words.
As has been pointed out in other answers Word does full justification by stretching the existing spaces often by very small amounts. This is only possible if you have full control over how your text is drawn on the screen (which word - or any other windows program has).
You only real option in this regard would be to implement your own text viewer on the platform you are targeting. Eg you would need to draw the text on the screen yourself (any platform that allows games should allow you to draw on the screen). However this seems like an awful lot of trouble to get justified text.
Sorry couldn't be of more help.
I have a two-column paper where space restrictions are very tight.
I just looked at my last version of the manuscript and saw that the upper half contains a figure (as expected), but in the lower half there is a lot of vertical space between paragraphs (enough to squeeze 10 more lines), and that LaTeX probably added it so that in the beginning of the next page a new numbered section will begin at the top of the page.
I know there's a way to adjust this so LaTeX doesn't try so hard, but I'm not sure how. any help? Thanks!
The parameter that controls inter-paragraph spacing is called \parskip(See Paragraph Spacing ). You set it (with "rubber" values) using something like:
\setlength{\parskip}{1cm plus4mm minus3mm}
The defualt value of \parskip is class dependent. The "plus" and "minus" parts tell TeX how much it can adjust the value to improve the layout (that is they make the spacing elastic, thus the "rubber" designation). Reducing (or eliminating) the "plus" part of the rubber might help.
Watch out though, you can cause other layout artifacts if you constrain TeX too much.
Other things to think about:
The widow and club penalties probably apply section headings, and may be affecting TeX's layout choices (see https://stackoverflow.com/questions/512967/how-can-one-keep-a-section-from-being-at-the-end-of-a-page-in-latex for a discussion).
You may also want to consider messing with \baselineskip which controls the allowed spacing between lines of text and can also have rubber values.
This is a common problem, and there are probably some fairly sophisticated treatments already prepared on CTAN.
\vfill before the new section worked perfectly for me.