Having my cake and eating it too

[TimP]

I'm still getting my feet wet in the UR pond, so please bear with me.

I'd like to have a little better formatting capability than the build-in RTF editor. For example, I'm doing academic work where appearance is pretty important, so paragraph styles are a good thing - even just double spacing would be nice.

So, I set my options to work in MS Word inside UR. Seems to work quite well - really well, in fact. I've got my formatting and all, but there's a new problem. Because UR creates a temp file in the middle of nowhere, my relative hyperlinks to external files (my cited references) don't work anymore. Sigh.

So, I'll live without the formatting because I can't live without snapping open my references. New problem: I reverted to editing with the internal RTF editor and now the details that I touched with Word need to be opened with the "Click here to open stored document" link and they are opened with Word externally, even though they're RTF, not MS Word format. Heavy sigh.

Questions: Can you get me out of this hole I've dug myself into? Is there a way to open a hyperlink stored in a form (I mean without copying and pasting) above the detail editing window? When are you going to pump up the internal RTF editor so I can stop messing around in Word?

Tim

[quant]

regarding double spacing and other simple formatting, you can use rich edit shortcuts, however note that some of them collide with UR shortcuts, so you'd need to change them in UR settings.

Rich edit controls support the following shortcut keys.

Keys Operations Comments
Shift+Backspace Generate a LRM/LRM on a bidi keyboard BiDi specific
Ctrl+Tab Tab
Ctrl+Clear Select all
Ctrl+Number Pad 5 Select all
Ctrl+A Select all
Ctrl+E Center alignment
Ctrl+J Justify alignment
Ctrl+R Right alignment
Ctrl+L Left alignment
Ctrl+C Copy
Ctrl+V Paste
Ctrl+X Cut
Ctrl+Z Undo
Ctrl+Y Redo
Ctrl+'+' (Ctrl+Shift+'=') Superscript
Ctrl+'=' Subscript
Ctrl+1 Line spacing = 1 line.
Ctrl+2 Line spacing = 2 lines.
Ctrl+5 Line spacing = 1.5 lines.
Ctrl+' (apostrophe) Accent acute After pressing the short cut key, press the appropriate letter (for example a, e, or u). This applies to English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish keyboards only.
Ctrl+` (grave) Accent grave See Ctrl+' comments.
Ctrl+~ (tilde) Accent tilde See Ctrl+' comments.
Ctrl+; (semicolon) Accent umlaut See Ctrl+' comments.
Ctrl+Shift+6 Accent caret (circumflex) See Ctrl+' comments.
Ctrl+, (comma) Accent cedilla See Ctrl+' comments.
Ctrl+Shift+' (apostrophe) Activate smart quotes
Backspace If text is protected, beep and do not delete it. Otherwise, delete previous character.
Ctrl+Backspace Delete previous word. This generates a VK_F16 code.
F16 Same as Backspace.
Ctrl+Insert Copy
Shift+Insert Paste
Insert Overwrite DBCS does not overwrite.
Ctrl+Left Arrow Move cursor one word to the left. On bidi keyboard, this depends on the direction of the text.
Ctrl+Right Arrow Move cursor one word to the right. See Ctrl+Left Arrow comments.
Ctrl+Left Shift Left alignment In BiDi documents, this is for left-to-right reading order.
Ctrl+Right Shift Right alignment In BiDi documents, this is for right-to-left reading order.
Ctrl+Up Arrow Move to the line above.
Ctrl+Down Arrow Move to the line below.
Ctrl+Home Move to the beginning of the document.
Ctrl+End Move to the end of the document.
Ctrl+Page Up Move one page up. If in SystemEditMode and Single Line control, do nothing.
Ctrl+Page Down Move one page down. See Ctrl+Page Up comments.
Ctrl+Delete Delete the next word or selected characters.
Shift+Delete Cut the selected characters.


Esc Stop drag-drop. While doing a drag-drop of text.
Alt+Esc Change the active application.
Alt+X Converts the Unicode hexadecimal value preceding the insertion point to the corresponding Unicode character.
Alt+Shift+X Converts the Unicode character preceding the insertion point to the corresponding Unicode hexadecimal value.
Alt+0xxx (Number Pad) Inserts Unicode values if xxx is greater than 255. When xxx is less than 256, ASCI range text is inserted based on the current keyboard. Must enter decimal values.


Alt+Shift+Ctrl+F12 Hex to Unicode. In case Alt+X is already taken for another use.
Alt+Shift+Ctrl+F11 Selected text will be output to the debugger window and saved to %temp%\DumpFontInfo.txt. For Debug only (need to set Flag=8 in Win.ini)
Ctrl+Shift+A Set all caps.
Ctrl+Shift+L Fiddle bullet style.
Ctrl+Shift+Right Arrow Increase font size. Font size changes by 1 point in the range 4pt-11pt; by 2points for 12pt-28pt; it changes from 28pt -> 36pt -> 48pt -> 72pt -> 80pt; it changes by 10 points in the range 80pt - 1630pt; the maximum value is 1638.
Ctrl+Shift+Left Arrow Decrease font size. See Ctrl+Shift+Right Arrow comments.

[TimP]

This'll save me the trouble of moving text back and forth between UR and Word to make some of these simple format changes. Thanks for this.

[kinook]

When editing text items internally with Word, Word actually saves the RTF file in DOC (native Word) format after editing. We have a utility that will convert Text items in DOC format back to RTF (it uses Word to perform the conversion, so that must also be installed).

To use it, download and extract this ZIP file to your Ultra Recall installation path (typically C:\Program Files\UltraRecall), open a Command Prompt, and run rtfconvert.exe with the .urd file(s) to convert as parameters, like so:

"C:\Program Files\UltraRecall\rtfconvert.exe" "c:\path\to\database1.urd" "c:\path\to\database2.urd"

And as always, backup your .urd files first.

Enhanced RTF editing is one of the additions in the next release, which will be entering beta soon. I can include you on the notification for the beta if you'd like.

[TimP]

I'd really be interested in the beta version.

And thanks for the additional conversion instructions.

Tim

[zargron]

Originally posted by TimP
I'm still getting my feet wet in the UR pond, so please bear with me.

Enjoy!

When are you going to pump up the internal RTF editor so I can stop messing around in Word?

Bit of a shame about that aspect of UR. I've been using AbiWord for a little while - open source in the C programming language. Don't know whether Kinook could have plugged that into UR. Seems they want to write their own RTF editor - a bit of reinventing the wheel IMHO - to which i'll very happily stand corrected. Formatting in next version (3.5) looks fantastic - we'll see how long it takes to clean up the rough edges around the editing.

[TimP]

I was actually deriving the impression that Kinook was acquiring their RTF editing code, but it's no mere trick to incorporate it into the product. I imagine that the idea of embedding MS Word was originally conceived to avoid all of this, but they've got a tiger by the tail there.

I sympathize deeply with software houses. Limiting run-away featurism is not only a technical problem, but a marketing and social one. Honest engaged developers genuinely feel like we're "all in this together" but only they are the losers when things get out of hand. Users can just move on. Developers will quickly find that the road to their own special hell is paved with their good intentions toward their user community.

Treepad is an example of this. It's hugely featured, lots of stuff. Its publishing capability is quite stunning and the RTF editor is way ahead of UR's, but the product is mired in older development tools and the developer is miles from providing item attributes and the complex searching that Kinook built into UR. I'm getting hooked on UR because of the attributes (much more database-like) but publishing a la Treepad would make it huge to a much wider audience. Web-based content management is attractive because of its inherently collaborative nature but PC-based content management is so snappy and personal, it's hard to ignore. I hope this is making sense.

Conclusion: I'm something of a pushy user, no doubt, but I'm trying my best to refrain from claiming to need every little feature that passes through my head.

[zargron]

Originally posted by TimP
I was actually deriving the impression that Kinook was acquiring their RTF editing code...

Don't know - would be an interesting bar room discussion - when, where and how they made their decision, then some insight into what they actually ended up doing.

...but it's no mere trick to incorporate it into the product.

For sure - plenty credit to them for what they have achieved.

I imagine that the idea of embedding MS Word was originally conceived to avoid all of this...

Partly - however I feel it was more about a combination of perceived market demand, (everyone uses "Word"), and the fact that one thing MS did pretty well was to provide exposure of necessary API for embedding certain infrastructure like MS Word.

...but they've got a tiger by the tail there.

Je ne comprends pas.

I sympathize deeply with software houses. Limiting run-away featurism is not only a technical problem, but a marketing and social one. Honest engaged developers genuinely feel like we're "all in this together" but only they are the losers when things get out of hand. Users can just move on. Developers will quickly find that the road to their own special hell is paved with their good intentions toward their user community.

I agree. Funny in a not so funny way for me today Tim. Had a meeting earlier where my good intentions were questioned and I was threatened ... let's just say in an interesting way.

Conclusion: I'm something of a pushy user, no doubt, but I'm trying my best to refrain from claiming to need every little feature that passes through my head.

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