How do I find the drop down menu that lists my favourite styles in RTF?
I don’t mean the ‘Format:Styles’ menu, but the one that is in the RTF document itself. I know it is there somewhere but I’ve forgotten how to activate it.
Many thanks
It’s part of the ruler: Format > Ruler > Show Ruler.
Is there any way to map selecting a custom style from this menu to a function key? So far, I have been using a modified version of Christian Grunenberg’s format script, which I have mapped to a keyboard shortcut. The problem is it only changes the properties of the selected text, and I would like some way of changing the properties not only of selected text, but of the text I am about to type – like, for example, when you italicise selected text or text you are about to type with cmd-i. Any suggestions?
Thanks.
Any thoughts on this, chaps?
Not easily. You could probably do some UI scripting (ugly and painful), but otherwise, this is not easy. In Snow Leopard you can assign keyboard shortcuts to the names of your favorite styles, but the menu that those shortcuts affect are buried in layers of other menus, so the shortcut would be practically useless. The other approach might be Keyboard Maestro or QuickKeys or Quicksilver, etc. A visit to their forums might yield some suggestions.
I spent a few minutes with this and think it would be really difficult to UI script:
activate application "DEVONthink Pro"
tell application "System Events"
tell process "DEVONthink Pro Office"
groups of UI element 1 of scroll area 1 of group 2 of window 1
end tell
end tell
This snippet returns no groups, so you can’t get to the group that holds the menu button.
A simpler approach, although by no means easy, would be to use one of the keyboard macro programs Korm mentioned and go through the menu bar. The advantage would be functionality for both 3-pane and separate document views…
HTH, Charles
Thanks you both for your help with this! I shall give your suggestions a short and report back.
J.
It worked perfectly with Quickeys. Very straightforward. Thanks again!
J.
Good. Perhaps you might post you QuickKeys solution here - for others to use?
I apologise for having taken so long to put this up – I’ve made some changes and I think people might find it useful. Thanks again to everyone who helped.
To make it work, you create a style you want, and call it something – in this case ‘Citation’.
In Quickeys, I mapped it to a function key, in this case F5. In practice, I have several of these, set to different styles. All you need to do is duplicate the shortcut, and change the name of the style to the relevant name.
I also added some extra instructions. I use the Text Replacement feature quite a lot, to save some time typing. By default, however, this is often switched off. This shortcut turns substitutions on every time you use it, which makes no perceivable change in performance, and means that it is always on.
Hope this is of use.
Apologies once again for the horrific delay.
Best,
Juan
Style to Citation shortcut.zip (3.35 KB)
I’ve just noticed that DT team have added the option of enabling Text Substitution on for all new documents in version 2.0.9, so the addition of the instructions in Quickeys to enable this every time is no longer necessary. Attached is a version of the shortcut that does not include this.
J.
Style to Citation 2.zip (3.45 KB)
My apologies if I’m missing something here, but my understanding is that you’re after a method to apply a customised style both to a text selection and to new text.
(As I think was mentioned above) all I do is create the style (by setting it up how I want in Favourite Styles), then create a shortcut in System Preferences for that named style. It works both for selected text and new text without any problems. I also create a custom default style to get back to where I was before. BTW I don’t check the ‘include ruler’ style because that tends to conflict with Apple’s flaky list and bullet implementation.
You do have to be careful not to get clashes with other shortcuts of course - I use ctrl-shift-alt as a base combination plus mnemonics for the style (ctl-shift-alt-Q for MyQuotation etc), a combination which isn’t much used elsewhere and I restrict the shortcuts to DTP, but that’s about it. I use the same approach in Scrivener, again without problems.
I’m concerned now that I’m missing something really obvious in what you need and I’m going to be embarassed… ;-( I think I’ll just slink away…
David
No, you are absolutely right. Your method is far more straightforward, and works far more efficiently. I’m rather embarrassed to admit that I was missing the most obvious way of doing this, and so spent ages trying to work out an alternative method, eventually opting for Quickeys. Oh well, I suppose it was useful before they implemented the option to switch on substitutions by default. Thanks for that!
Best,
Juan
No problem - glad I could help!
David