Two notebook wishes

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Tue, 03/23/2010 - 03:39 am

1: The header & footer editing has to occur in a space of about 20px, and now that the notebooks are capable of quite sophisticated report generation, complex headers are in use; could the "Notebook->Document Settings->Edit header..." window be made adjustable to reveal multiline headers?

2: It would be great to be able to query Igor what the ruler, font, size, style, etc actually are at the insertion-point / start-of-selection, as the current ruler can have been added to by in-line commands which persist. This must already exist but is not to my knowledge extractable.

Regards,
Patrick.
In Igor 6.1 there are new headerPos and footerPos keywords for the Notebook operation that let you control if and where the header and footer appear.

Quote:
It would be great to be able to query Igor what the ruler, font, size, style, etc actually are at the insertion-point / start-of-selection, as the current ruler can have been added to by in-line commands which persist.


I'm not sure why you want to do this but you can get some of this information using the WinRecreation function. See the Notebook Details section of the help for WinRecreation. You would then need to parse the returned text which could be tricky.

March 23, 2010 at 05:01 pm - Permalink

The problem is that if you generate formatted text programmatically, you may not know which additional formatting commands (fSize, fStyle, etc) have been added to the current ruler, and the 'ruler=rulername' command does not reset existing addons:
•notebook notebook0,ruler=Normal,text="frog\r";
•notebook notebook0,fSize=16,fStyle=1,text="toad\r";
•notebook notebook0,ruler=Normal,text="newt\r";
•notebook notebook0,ruler=Normal,fSize= -1,fStyle= -1,text="newt\r";

The first 'newt' still follows the 'bold, 16pt' requests from the 'toad' line. You can explicitly turn them off as in the second 'newt' line, but this would require all of text colour, vOffset, and others to be reset each time. A few possible solutions:

- never use add-on commands. Define new rulers for every occasion and just call each as required. In-line format changes can still be used if every format change is undone at the end of the paragraph. I do use this already but is hard to program for complex formatting.

- a wish list item "format= -1" to reset all of the formats back to the named (or current) ruler.

- the original request, of a 'formatInfo' string detailing the current state

Now that I look at it again, the ability to force all formatting back to a named ruler seems best.

March 31, 2010 at 03:33 pm - Permalink

I see the point. I have added this to the wish list.

You can do most of it already. This:

Notebook Notebook0, fSize= -1, fStyle= -1, font="default", vOffset=0, textRGB=(0,0,0)


sets all text formats to current ruler's defaults. It contains the assumption of what the default vOffset and textRGB are.

March 31, 2010 at 06:33 pm - Permalink

I have posted a code snippet to fully reset all parameters to their original settings here.

April 4, 2010 at 09:37 pm - Permalink