CSS features

[friedemann_bach]

Dear developers,

I noticed that some CSS features, which are of great importance for some of my projects, are currently not supported in the Author Mode. They are CSS 2 standard, though, and supported by all standard browsers. Would it be possible to support them in one of the next versions?

This concerns (for my purposes, so far):
- letter-spacing
- text-indent
- text-align:justify

It would be great if I could use these properties not only in my broser, but also in the Author Mode.

Or maybe somebody knows a workaround?

Best regards,
friedemann_bach

[Radu]

Hi,

Thanks for the feature requests. We already have issues opened for all three of them and I added your contact details to all of them so that when one of them is done the forum thread will be updated.
Probably at some point in a future version we'll manage to work and implement the letter-spacing and the text-indent properties. The justify text alignment is quite hard to do and requires quite a lot of architecture changes on our side, so no guarantees for implementing this one in a future version.

Regards,
Radu

[friedemann_bach]

Hi Radu,

thank you for your response, that is good news. In fact, my two personal priorities are letter-spacing and text-indent, while text-align:justify would more be like a "luxury" feature.

Best regards,
friedemann

[Radu]

Hi,

I forgot to ask you about the use case, probably your main use case is to have the edited content look more like the generated HTML content in a web browser, correct?
For example, why would you use the text-indent for? Do you need negative indent for certain paragraphs?

Regards,
Radu

[friedemann_bach]

Hi Radu,

we are planning to transcribe 19th century texts (from print, mostly journals or newspapers) to TEI XML. Wide letter-spacing and indented paragraphs are very typical for that time. It would be perfect for the transcribers if I could configure the Author Mode to look as similar as possible to the originals. Negative indent is much less frequent, but appears sometimes as well. My priority would be first line indent.

Many thanks!
friedemann

[Radu]

Hi,

For indenting the first line of a paragraph you can add an inline before element with a little bit of spacing in it like:

Code: Select all

p:before{

    content: "  ";

}

Regards,
Radu

[friedemann_bach]

Yes, indeed this is a practical workaround, which I had figured out some days before. Thanks nonetheless Of course, from an ideal perspective, it would be nice to have the Author Mode CSS as similar as possible to a standard web browser CSS.

I still haven't found a workaround for the letter-spacing - if somebody had any hint ...

Best regards,
friedemann

[Radu]

Hi,

No workaround for now, besides loading and using another TTF font family for those elements, maybe a font in which characters are by default spaced out.
I looked a little bit into providing support for letter spacing, it looks feasible and if all goes well you will have that in Oxygen 17 (spring of 2015).

Regards,
Radu

[stdu]

Hi Radu,

support for letter-spacing would be great.
+1 from me

Thx & Greets,
Stefan

[Radu]

Thanks Stefan,

I added your vote for it. The feature will probably work in the Oxygen standalone but it will not work in the Oxygen plugin for Eclipse because we do not have enough platform support there to make this work there.

Regards,
Radu

[friedemann_bach]

Hi Radu,

spring 2015 would be just perfect for our project. Thank you very much for looking into our issue!

I will also try the method with the font family you proposed.

All the best,
friedemann