Text handling

Xway
1

I have been watching Xway as it is in beta and hadn’t started building any sites in earnest until now. I just decided to dig in and study the manual in preparation for attempting to make a real site that hopefully someday soon will replace my main business site once Xway is further along.

I came across an issue. In Freeway, I was able to create line break between paragraphs by typing return, but could also create non breaking lines with shift/return, so as to keep short lines together, which I do frequently when listing product descriptions where the text needs to be together but not on the same line.

I can’t find a way to do that in Xway. The only break I can seem to make is a full paragraph break. Is this possible, and if not, will it be added later?

2

Hi Bert,

We will add this in a future version of Xway, but you can do this using markup items for now:

  1. Choose Markup from the Insert menu
  2. Type “
    ” (without the quotes)
  3. Select the Inline checkbox
  4. OK
    You can also copy/paste existing markup items, if you need to add several breaks.
    Jeremy
3

Thanks for that. It will work for now, as the output is what I want, but the preview shows the html element and the text all on the same line. I assume that once the
is a feature of Xway that the preview will show the line breaks correctly?

4

Yes. Once we support line breaks directly, they will appear in the layout view.

Jeremy

5

That will be really good! I’d also like non-breaking spaces to be supported, ideally (from my point of view) typed using the common alt-space keystroke combination.

6

Both these requests (line breaks and non-breaking spaces) are now logged in our database.

Jeremy

7

Hi Bert,

Have you tried Control/Return? That gives me the line break without the gap between the two.

Peter A-B

8

Replying to myself. Control/Return works if the container is set to the width of the whole text but in a large container where the whole of the text can fit on one line then there is no apparent carriage return so my suggestion has limited value. Sorry. We’ll have to wait for the implementation.

Peter.

On Thu, 18 Feb 2021 at 08:40, Peter A-B via groups.io <Wessex121=email@hidden> wrote:

Hi Bert,

Have you tried Control/Return? That gives me the line break without the gap between the two.

Peter A-B

9

I’d also like non-breaking spaces to be supported

Actually, this should be supported already. Option-Space inserts a Unicode non-breaking space, and Xway outputs that.

Jeremy

10

In my explorations into Xway, I’ve been using the Control/Return for non breaking lines and it’s very helpful, but I’m wondering why you chose Control/Return and not Shift/Return which is what Freeway uses and which is the standard for most all other text software?

One other thing; and this was an issue in Freeway as well: When I paste in text for item descriptions, they are usually 3-8 lines of short text that I prepare outside of the layout and then paste in place, mostly under the image they describe. If I prepare the text using a text editor and use non breaking lines, the text pastes into Xway without the non breaking line breaks and I have to manually replace them. Is there any way to retain the breaks as non breaking when pasted?

11

  1. Xway uses Control-Return because it’s the standard Apple shortcut for Cocoa text views.

  2. Type “Hello[Control-Return]world” in TextEdit

  3. Place the text insertion point in either line

  4. Select center alignment

  5. Both lines are centred (showing that they are treated as a single paragraph)

  6. Pasting soft returns from TextEdit to Xway works for me:

  7. Type “Hello[Control-Return]world” in TextEdit

  8. Copy and paste into Xway

  9. Place the text insertion point in either line

  10. Select center alignment

  11. Both lines are centred in Xway
    Jeremy

12

Works like a charm, thank you very much. I was unaware of the persistence of the control/return character, that is very helpful.

I decided to try my hand at re-building my entire site in Xway over the next several weeks so I’ll let you know if I come across any issues.