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WhichSymbolPlus (updated 12 Dec 2010)


Ego Eram Reputo

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It only allows one to select (or type a number) for a character upto 125

Which reminds me of the old ASCII limit of 124

Related?

Anyhoo - as I wanted little arrows and side facing triangles to bung over the top of

screen shots of medical software - I can't use it; which a pity really. I liked the idea.

Did you check out the original (WhichSymbol) or the enhanced version (WhichSymbolPlus)?

If you view the first screenshot on my first post, you'll see that WingDings has a range of arrows. Wingdings2 & 3 have even more. The Character slider has an upper limit of 255 (original WhichSymbol) - you might be able to guess that from the screenshot. I am bemused as to why you're unable to select a character beyond 125. I'll look into this....,

Thanks for your feedback.

[edit]

chrisjw37: download the original version of WhichSymbol (click the link on my sig) and all should be well. The newer version of WhichSymbol(plus) is having one or two birthing problems which should be resolved very soon. Until then, grab the original.

[/edit]

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  • 4 weeks later...

New version of WhichSymbolPlus added to original post 9th August.

Please note that this the most recent version and replaces those in the above posts (and also hopefully without any bugs!). :lol:

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  • 4 months later...

I know it's a bit late, but I have a suggestion.

It would be much easier to use if there were 16 columns and they were numbered 0 to F. That way you wouldn't have to add anything, since the lowest 4 bits of the row number would always be 0, so there would be no carry.

It's not that adding is hard, but not-adding is infinitely easier - you'd just concatenate the row address and the column offset.

Alternatively, for people who think hexadecimal is hard, you could use 10 columns and do the same in base 10.

I would write plugins, if I knew what kind of plugins were needed.. :(

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Hi Harold,

Thank you for your suggestion.

I wrote the columns and rows that way in order to preserve the decimal notation used in the alt + number key combinations. For example, when using the text tool (Arial font) Alt + 0169 generates the © character. When you call up the Arial font in WhichSymbolPlus, © can be found in position 166 +3 = 169.

I thought preserving this format would be easier for users who switch between the two character input systems.

The problem with base 10 is that the number of rows is going to be over 20 if we limit the width to just 10 columns. I tried a number of combinations before I decided the square layout would probably fit most canvasses best.

Method in my madness :D

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Hm I didn't know that.. also makes sense

But I still find it somewhat inconvenient, probably because I'm not used to the Alt+num combo's at all, except for the µ because Alt+M doesn't work in all games but I still want to talk about µTorrent sometimes..

But about about 16 columns? Wouldn't that fit even better than 14 (??) columns? could it be made variable? that's probably a lot more work than making it fixed though.. but it would suit everyone

I would write plugins, if I knew what kind of plugins were needed.. :(

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Here is my reasoning: numbers below 32 don’t yield symbols or characters, so we can discard having to draw them. The largest character number is 256. This gives us 256 – 31 = 225 characters to display.

Now 16x14 columns gives us 224 positions for the characters. That's one less than we need :(

If we use 15x15* we get the full 225 characters, no overlap, and nothing missed as 15 = SQRT(225). :)

Yes I could recode the plugin to make the columns vs rows adjustable. No, I’m not going to. Sorry. The source to the original (codelab) plugin is still hanging around my hard-drive. If you want to fiddle with it yourself, just let me know and I'll send it to you.

*I think you might have missed one column when you counted them :wink:

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Ah yes you have one less column in your screenshot on page 1, but 15 rows in the actual plug-in

I never really noticed :lol:

Anyhow, adding 7 to 196 is not as easy as adding B to C0 (which is the same symbol)

By the way, there can be symbols in the 1 - 32 range.. but not at 0 (or if it Does exists, it will never get rendered)

Ok here's the idea (I hacked the DLL and obviously I won't spread it unless you allow me to)

11395_e3b51dc7581875b53b424484b6e2d179

Well it's not exactly finished (the input field to choose the symbol should be hexadecimal as well to make sense) but it's easy to see the idea.

I would write plugins, if I knew what kind of plugins were needed.. :(

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The WinXX accessory Charmap does not list usable characters below 32. Neither does Word when you "Insert Symbol" (hardly scientific I know...,). As far as I know, these are special system characters like linefeed (10) and carriage return (13), so I'm not sure that it is desirable to have users accessing the area below character 32.

I have no problem with you adding the changes you like. Also, I would have not had a problem giving you the source, but you found an alternative :wink: Simon Brown wrote much of that source however, so I think you should PM him to be sure he has no problems with what you're doing.

As far as releasing your changes, I would prefer to keep the plugin in it's current state. Feel free to provide a link your version so users can access it if they wish.

Oh and I found it a little more user friendly to leave the character number and size inputs enabled, rather than disabling them with the checkbox.

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One thing I noticed about the source while cleaning it for the new WhichSymbolPlus is that it clears the canvas twice.

Just after defining the fonts:

     Font F13 = new Font("Wingdings 2", 16);
     Font F14 = new Font("Wingdings 3", 16);      

//  Clear the canvas by copying existing image (source) to destination
     for(int y = rect.Top; y < rect.Bottom; y++)
         for (int x = rect.Left; x < rect.Right; x++) 
             dst[x,y] = src[x,y]; 

As well as just after the if statement for displaying all characters:

if (Amount4==true)
   {

   //  Start with a clear the canvas 
     for(int y = rect.Top; y < rect.Bottom; y++)
         for (int x = rect.Left; x < rect.Right; x++) 
             dst[x,y] = src[x,y]; 

KaHuc.png
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Well spotted! Thanks for the update Simon. I have updated the plugin accordingly and added it to the first post.

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  • 5 weeks later...

This plugin allows you to insert a symbol from a font onto the current layer. Think of it like a single character version of the text tool. Which symbol are you having trouble recreating, and what is the font you're using?

Font "Wingdings" has a rose symbol, character numbers 123 or 124 if this helps.

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  • 7 months later...
  • 1 year later...

Updated 24 October 2010.

WhichSymbol (which I'm now calling 'Redux' just to differentiate the versions) has a brand new UI.

The first post in this thread has been updated so you can see how it looks.

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Great plugin! One thing that I have always had trouble with was remembering which key represents each symbol in fonts like Webdings . This has made things so much easier. Thanks very much. ;)

 

 

Please feel free to visit my Gallery on PDNFans

And my Alternatives to PDN

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Very clever new UI. Is this made in CodeLab or Visual Studio?

CodeLab definitely can't do that.

xZYt6wl.png

ambigram signature by Kemaru

[i write plugins and stuff]

If you like a post, upvote it!

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Yup, Pyrochild is correct as usual.

Codelab, for all it's power, doesn't support the ListView control (thats the bit where you select a symbol by clicking on it). So I've been fiddling with C# express edition to build the latest incarnation.

I wanted to have a series of 'History' buttons, where each selection was placed in the most recent button for quick recall. I got the XML file saving, but loading proved a major pain. In the end it proved too troublesome to continue with, but I might look at it again when I get time.

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  • 1 month later...

Thanks to @pyrochild, a new version of the world famous WhichSymbol plugin has just been made available (see first post).

This new version remembers your 10 previous character selections and enables quick recall of any of those characters with the click of a button. Simple really.

For those of you who really want to know, the selection details are saved to an XML file (WhichSymbolRedux.xml) & loaded each time the plugin is run. Any changes are committed back to the file when the OK button is clicked.

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