Rockwell / sIFR 3 - with special characters (£, etc.) - sifr

Is there anywhere I can download a SWF fo sIFR 3 of the Rockwell font (like the one that comes with sIFR 3), but with a bunch of special characters embedded too? Specifically the pound sign (£), but more would be great :)
I don't have access to Flash right now and I've tried the automatic tools but with little success. I've looked everywhere, does anyone have any pointers?
Many thanks!

Indeed, the answer was simple. A tool that does work with the latest sIFR revisions:
http://www.sifrgenerator.com/

You might want to try a JavaScript only solution.
Check this one out, it's called TypeFace. See also here on Stack Overflow.

Related

How to avoid ligatures within option-tag?

I'd like to create a visually appealing select-dialog that shows FontAwesome-Icons and a word describing the symbol to select from various scales for statistical data.
So I'm using the FontAwesome-Fonts for the select-tag and the unicode-glyphs for the various symbols. That first part works nicely.
But the words I am using are also used in FonAwesome to form ligatures that can also be used to get the icons (I thought this was limited to the desktop-version, but as my example prooves, it also happens on the web). The FA-Site states that they are "...aren't comfortable considering ligatures for Web Fonts + CSS".
Please check out my fiddle here or the screenshot:
So, my questions are:
if it's not supposed to happen with Webfonts/CSS - is there anything that I am doing wrong using them? (Of course I have the desktop-fonts installed on my machine, I guess we won't know if users of the website will have them or not)
is there any way I can avoid the ligatures taking effect within the option-tag? (as you see in the sample, I am already using font-variant-ligatures: none; in the CSS)
I found a way to solve this by defining dedicated #font-faces with a different name. (My theory is that Chrome uses the local font I have installed and that it's ligatures override everything I do in CSS). That "special font-face" is sure not to be found locally...
If someone finds a better explanation or fix, I'll happily accept it.

Arabic / Hebrew and jQuery Mobile

This is a question and an answer :-)
For a long time now I tried using JQM with Hebrew. Getting the Hebrew letter is easy (utf-8 encoding...) , but the thing that didn't work was the alignment..
I mean switching the direction of the elements, the text alignment, positioning etc.
I found many questions about this, but few answers (and the ones I found didn't do a complete job).
Then I found this excellent article:
http://rtl-this.com/tutorial/rtling-hello-world-webpage-rtling
And I implemented it on the css file (more precisely on the one here: http://code.jquery.com/mobile/1.0/jquery.mobile-1.0.css ).
That worked :-)
And if I'll figure out how to upload a file, I'll share :-)
I hope this will be useful.
You have to make changes to the JavaScript file as well to make sliders and flip switches work properly. Here is the full version of jQuery Mobile RTL I made.
I've recently tried to use jQuery mobile to develop an Arabic iOS application with RTL layout, and while jQuery Mobile doesn't support RTL yet, it wasn't too hard to hack the CSS to make it look and act like a proper RTL application.
But I ended up abandoning jQM altogether because, at least as of 1.0.1, the performance was simply unacceptable.
I tried a few hacks like removing all gradients (which helped a little) and disabling animation (which didn't), but it still took a good half a second for the UI to respond to user input.
I'm sure things will improve with the time, but for now at least jQuery Mobile is not an option for me. Its a shame too because it's declarative programming model is so deliciously easy to use.

Does anyone know resources for LaTex

I want to use LaTex to write equations faster and if it is possible to export the result as a png or jpg so that it can be used on a website.
Wikipedia (and its opensource wiki engine) uses LaTeX for that, maybe there are some resources available (at least in the code, as it is opensource).
Your question is very broad. You could start with Amazon's List of Latex Books.
You might want to investigate the StackExchange site mathoverflow.net solution - you can read about here. It uses jsMath which supports a lot of LaTeX syntax.
Assuming you already know a little LateX and your primary goal is to get images, a good high-level tool is mathTeX; there are even public servers that will convert to images for you.
If you want to do everything yourself, all the tools use dvipng at bottom.
I like both MathBin.net and Roger's Online Equation Editor. The latter lets you control the quality of the output. See also this question.
try this: http://hausheer.osola.com/latex2png
Here is a small symbol reference for LaTeX. If you are looking for something more as a general introduction, you can look at "The Not So Short Introduction To LaTeX2e". If you use Inkscape, there is built in support for rendering LaTeX and there are also extensions that do the same. You can read some commentary about it here. There are also things like LaTeX to HTML converters; However, at the time I was looking at them, they were somewhat limited in what formulas they could display.
I taught myself LaTeX using the wikibook. It's fairly comprehensive as an initial guide. I've since bought The LaTeX Companion, which is a more advanced guide to in depth typesetting in LaTeX
I use http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/LaTeX/AoPS_L_TeXer.php when I need a quick equation for a web site.
There are packages that will automatically produce images from LaTeX source, but these are often either buggy or used incorrectly. Many people install them on their blogs, for example, and the images show up if you visit the blog directly but they don't show up if you view the page via a blog reader. I'm not saying these problems can't be fixed. They can, but it often takes a few tries.
I prefer just to make a gif and stick it in the page. It's low tech and reliable.
One more tip: it's a good idea to put the LaTeX source in the alt tag of the image. This helps people using screen readers. It helps you too if you need to modify the equation later.
Detextify is a great site that lets you draw a symbol, and it will pop up a list of latex commands that may match your drawing. It's quite accurate! http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html

Setting up help for a Delphi app

What's the best way to set up help (specifically HTML Help) for a Delphi application? I can see several options, all of which has disadvantages. Specifically:
I could set HelpContext in the forms designer wherever appropriate, but then I'm stuck having to track numbers instead of symbolic constants.
I could set HelpContext programmatically. Then I can use symbolic constants, but I'd have more code to keep up with, and I couldn't easily check the text DFMs to see which forms still need help.
I could set HelpKeyword, but since that does a keyword lookup (like Application.HelpKeyword) rather than a topic jump (like Application.HelpJump), I'd have to make sure that each of my help pages has a unique, non-changing, top-level keyword; this seems like extra work. (And there are HelpKeyword-related VCL bugs like this and this.)
I could set HelpKeyword, set an Application.OnHelp handler to convert HelpKeyword requests to HelpJump requests so that I can assign help by topic ID instead of keyword lookup, and add code such as my own help viewer (based on HelpScribble's code) that fixes the VCL bugs and lets HelpJump work with anchors. By this point, though, I feel like I'm working against the VCL rather than with it.
Which approach did you choose for your app?
When I first started researching how to do this several years ago, I first got the "All About help files in Borland Delphi" tutorial from: http://www.ec-software.com/support_tutorials.html
In that document, the section "Preparing a help file for context sensitive help" (which in my version of the document starts on page 28). It describes a nice numbering scheme you can use to organize your numbers into sections, e.g. Starting with 100000 for your main form and continuing with 101000 or 110000 for each secondary form, etc.
But then I wanted to use descriptive string IDs instead of numbers for my Help topics. I started using THelpRouter, which is part of EC Software's free Help Suite at: http://www.ec-software.com/downloads_delphi.html
But then I settled on a Help tool that supported string ID's directly for topics (I use Dr. Explain: http://www.drexplain.com/) so now I simply use HelpJump, e.g.:
Application.HelpJump('UGQuickStart');
I hope that helps.
We use symbolic constants. Yes, it is a bit more work, but it pays off. Especially because some of our dialogs are dynamically built and sometimes require different help IDs.
I create the help file, which gets the help topic ID, and then go around the forms and set their HelpContext values to them. Since the level of maintenance needed is very low - the form is unlikely to change help file context unless something major happens - this works just fine.
We use Help&Manual - its a wonderful tool, outputting almost any format of stuff you could want, doc, rtf, html, pdf - all from the same source. It will even read in (or paste from rtf (eg MSWord). It uses topic ID's (strings) which I just keep a list of and I manually put each one into a form (or class) as it suits me. Sounds difficult but trust me you'll spend far longer hating the wrong authouring tool. I spent years finding it!
Brian

Customizing a TListBox to resemble an Outlook list

Please down vote me if this is not appropriate, but I'm desperate to the point of pulling my hair out looking for this link. This is really a last resort.
Recently I browsed to a blog (at least I think it was) that had a very detailed description on how to modify a TListBox to have a multi-line look resembling some of the entries on an outlook list of emails, with a Title and the initial content. It was a particular good example because it had all the code for the modified TItem and TItemList objects and loads of images with that look
I've scoured my Firefox History, my Chrome history, my FeedDemon Feeds and my Google Bookmarks to no avail. I've done Google searches with TListBox, TListView, TItems, TItemList, Custom, Extending and some other variations and even looked 3 page results down to no avail...
Has anyone stumbled upon this article?
Please let an "old" man recover his memory, and his sanity :)
Cheers,
Gus
How to use is the one that "TListbox Ownerdraw Delphi" finds for me. Certainly Ownerdraw is what you are looking at to do this sort of thing. Good luck!
To answer my question with a proper answer:
Blaise Pascal Magazine Issue 4 November 2008 page 27.

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