DriveWorks Pro 22

How To: Correctly Format Text (KB13021901)

Text Formatting

DriveWorks supports the use of formatting tags in the following areas:

• The Text property of a label control.
• The Tooltip Text property of all controls.

To achieve the above example, prior to DriveWorks 10, multiple label controls would have to be placed next to each other. Each would have to be formatted individually using a mixture of existing control properties.

This can now be done in a single Label control.

The supported tags used for formatting label text are as follows:

• b - defines text that is to be bold.
• i - defines text that is to be italic.
• u - defines text that is to be underlined.
• color - defines text that is to be a specific color (requires the name or hexadecimal value of a color to be specified).

Label Formatting Syntax

Start Tag

To apply formatting the supported tag must be placed within the quotes of the text to display, at the point the formatting is to start and within square [] brackets.

• Bold tag - [b]
• Italic tag - [i]
• Underline tag - [u]

End Tag

An End Tag is only required if the formatting is to end before the end of the text to display. If no End Tag is specified all text from the point at which the Start Tag is placed will be formatted.

An End Tag begins with the forward slash /, followed by the tag all within square brackets [].

• Bold end tag - [/b]
• Italic end tag - [/i]
• Underline end tag - [/u]

Color Start Tag and Color End Tag

The color tag syntax is essentially the same as the above examples, the only difference being the Start Tag only will contain the color to apply to the formatted text, as below.

Start Tag [color green] - End Tag [/color]

Transparency

Transparency is supported for the [color] format tag.

This can be specified by setting an additional two hex characters before the hex color code, for example:

For the tag [color #22000000] - the “22” will apply an almost transparent black color to the text.

There is also support for setting a hex color using the shortened hex code, which is the three character version so #FFFFFF will be #FFF.

The three character version also supports transparency through the addition of one extra character before the color code, for example:

[color #22000000] is equivalent to [color #2000]

Unfortunately not all web browsers support transparency. IE7 and IE8 will not support transparency as they require certain CSS properties to be set that would affect text wrapping in the Label. In order to still provide text wrapping the decision was made to not support IE7 and IE8. If a transparency is added into the color tag when in one of these browsers the transparency part will be ignored and the color will be applied as normal.

Examples

Quotations Marks""

Quotation Marks in rules are used to denote text as strings but sometimes you need to be able to show a quotation mark " within a string

To do this you have to surround the quotes in other quotes. See below for examples

Escaping Tags

There may be times where the tags used to format text are actually required to be displayed as text. In these circumstances escaping tags are used.

For example you may require the text “Enter [b] for bold” to be displayed. In this case you need to escape the “[“ character in order for it to be interpreted as a square bracket and not as part of a tag.

It is important to note that the end square bracket “]” is not an escape character and therefore does not need to be escaped in order to display it as text and not as part of the tag.

Whenever two opening square brackets “[[“ are together before a tag these can interpreted as a single opening square bracket as the first one will escape (ignore) the next one.

Text Wrapping Support

The default behavior of the Label is to allow text to wrap and in particular to have the ability to wrap text mid word.

For example:

Fig 1. Text wrapping in all browsers except Opera.

Fig 2. Text wrapping in Opera – with formatting.

Fig 3. Text wrapping in Opera – no formatting.