[ubuntu-za] Highlighting in a list

[Adrianna Pinska]

On Sat, Dec 11, 2010 at 11:00 AM, SHAWN REITSTEIN <shawnreit at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi, how easy is it (if at all possible) to be able to highlight a line
> in a list. Eg: in "Office", when one clicks "Open" - there's the list
> of all saved Office documents...if one could highlight a line on the
> list, it would be easier to find!? ( Bold, Cursive, underline - maybe
> some different coloured highlights too? Is there such software? How
> difficult to write?

Highlight *which* line in a list?  How does the software know which
line you want to find?

In the standard Gnome and KDE dialogs for opening files, if you start
typing a file name a list of matching files pops up -- you can
complete typing the name or select the file you want with the mouse.
It's not a full text search (it only matches the beginning of the file
name), but it does help.

Writing a custom file opening dialog is probably not that hard, but
attaching it to arbitrary applications may not be simple.  I think
most applications which are written to use a particular graphical
toolkit just use the standard file-opening dialog that comes with that
toolkit; you can't swap in a different file-opening application
without editing their code.

(Personally, I think it would be nice if more applications did treat
e.g. file opening dialogs as handlers which could be overridden. I
know there are some features I would always like to have in a file
opening dialog, like sorting by extension.)

A different way to approach this is to find a standalone application
which lets you browse the files on your computer and open them in
whatever application is appropriate.  Have you looked at Gnome Do?
It's inspired by OS X's Quicksilver.  The Ubuntu package is called
gnome-do.  If you use a KDE desktop, you may prefer Kupfer.

http://do.davebsd.com/
http://kaizer.se/wiki/kupfer/

> Also interested in a mouse- pen that can
> write/draw anywhere, anytime on any page? Pls advise -

What do you mean by "write" and "page"?

If you want a mouse you can write with like with a pen, you probably
want a graphics tablet.  From the software side it will be mostly be
treated like a normal mouse.  Some tablets have hardware support for
detecting the amount of pressure you're using, or that you're
"erasing" with the back of the pen -- but in order for this to work,
you will also need software support (the right drivers, and the right
application).  If you're going to buy a tablet, you should first check
if it's supported properly under Linux -- I don't know off-hand what
the current situation is and what models are good, but you should be
able to find out more by googling.

You can't write words with your graphics tablet into a text file any
more than you can do it with a normal mouse.  You can *draw* words in
a drawing program, like the GIMP, and save them as a picture.  You can
then try using OCR (optical character recognition) software to convert
the picture into text -- but you should be aware that this is a
difficult problem to solve even with scanned printed text, which is
much more regular than handwriting.  To achieve any degree of success
you will almost certainly have to train the software to recognise your
handwriting.  I think the best OCR software available for Linux today
is tesseract, but IIRC it's not very user-friendly, so be prepared for
a bit of a learning curve.

There are also apparently some Linux programs specifically designed to
recognise handwriting.  I don't know how good they are.  If you're
interested, try googling for something like:

https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=linux+handwriting+recognition

Regards,
-- 
Adrianna Pińska
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