We have client where their documents require certain words/sentences have dotted underlines. To my knowledge this isn't something that XPP can do. The only thing we could think of is somehow try to use the leader fill macro, but this approach would be problematic as many of the underlines span several lines. Does anyone have any thoughts/ideas??
Thanks in advance!
Hmm that might be a challenge.
Depending on circumstances frills processing might be the answer in which you draw the dotted lines in a frill block.
The problem with a frills processing solution is that there is no way to mark a spot within a line.
Which means one can easily find the vertical position of a marked spot but not its horizontal position. (I feel a new wishlist item coming up...)
Now if the line is not justified, then you could store that spot during regular compose using xyperl.
But if the line is justified, you can not do that as the value of the spaceband is not known.
So within certain limits frills processing could be the answer.
Another rather crazy idea would be to use the <pt> macro and define your own pattern that is a dotted line.
But that might run into other trouble as the pattern gets repeated and I do not know what is the vertical size of a single pattern block.
Plus this will probably get you into trouble when you want to use the new direct PDF output.
I've been meaning to post this for a while now. I wanted to give everyone an update on how I got around XPP not supporting dotted underlines. Although dotted underlines are not an option (wish list item), you have the ability to create multiple styles of solid underlines. I was able to create a new underline style with a very specific line weight where as it would be unique to only the spots I needed the underline and not be anywhere else in my documents. I was then able to create an action using the Adobe Acrobat plugin Enfocus Pit stop that searches the document for any line with my specific line weight and change it to a dotted line. I was actually quite surprised by the control I was able to achieve with this method in terms of the spacing of the dots etc.
I'll actually be demonstrating this solution in a session I'll be hosting at the Conference this fall called "Outside the Box". I am hopeful that others in the community will be willing to share creative solutions they've come across in their environments as this will be a round table session.
Update: The ability to define dotted (and dashed) underlines (as well as defining color and pattern) was added to XPP with the 9.4.0 release.
Jonathan Dagresta
SDL XPP Engineering
Jonathan Dagresta
RWS Group/XPP Development
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