decimal tab problem, chosing character with which to align.

[batman1234]

hi,

I have a problem with the decimal tab in tables. I have the german version of nisus and in german a comma (for ex. 2,3) is used as a decimal point. I am however writing in english and using a point "." (for ex. 2.3) . When I want to align the numbers within a table, it will however not accept a dot only a comma.
how can I change which character is used for alignment? mellel, papyrus and pages have an option window where you can chose, I hope nisus has this important feature.

thanks,

Robert

[Ruchama]

Did you try setting the leading character through the Default Leader Tab settings? (click on the small tab sign on the top, just below the tools ruler, select the option on the bottom of the menu, then select Decimal, and custom character) I never tried it but it seems to be what you are looking for.

[martin]

I think Robert is having trouble with the alignment of the tabbed text, not with the leader tab character, but thanks for the advice Ruchama.

As to aligning numbers, the decimal tab picks up the setting from your OSX system preferences. Under the International area, do you have the "Format" tab set to a region that uses commas for the decimal place separator? You can check by looking at the preview in the "Numbers" area. If you make a change here you'll need to restart NWP before the changes take effect.

That said, we should probably automatically use commas/periods as appropriate for the language you've applied to the text, eg: change the tab alignment character automatically, as we do with spellcheck/etc. I'll file a bug.

[batman1234]

thanks to both of you for your advice.

thanks martin....it worked!!!! saved me and others working on our project a lot of troubles trying to find a workaround.

If i could give some feedback:

changing the tab alignment character to comma or periods automatically, depending on which language you use is a good idea. but even better would be to additionally have an option window where you can chose the tab alignment character freely to any character of choice...(for example we have mutlilingual texts, with tables in english and text in german and french)....mellel has this option I think, (I still prefer nisus
it´s an important feature and would make the table function of nisus much more powerful..

thanks again for your help...

cheers robert mundackal + kai porsche

[brifer]

Not quite on this topic, but Leopard and PinPoint's Fullscreen Crosshairs is most useful for lining-up rows and/or columns, especially where text or tables require scrolling from one view to another.

I find PinPoint's crosshairs are particularly useful in aligning text columns with their responsible tabs in NWP.

For demonstrations, which is what PinPoint was designed for, being able to increase the visibility of the cursor is wonderful.

For trial of PinPoint, go to <info@macchampion.com>.

==========
Best wishes,
15:54:11; Tue, Jan 27, 2009.
==========

[martin]

Always happy to give batman a hand at fighting crime and/or aligning text

changing the tab alignment character to comma or periods automatically, depending on which language you use is a good idea. but even better would be to additionally have an option window where you can chose the tab alignment character freely to any character of choice

Quite right, I'll file both as feature requests, thanks.

[ngazidja]

Hi Martin,

How are we getting on with this? (You've had ten years... )

I'm trying to do the opposite of the OP, I want decimal tabs to align with a comma since I'm writing in German. I can't even see how to do this using OS system preferences - language and region doesn't seem to have any effect on Nisus.

Iain.

[Vanceone]

If yuo are running Mojave, in the Language & Region preferences in System Preferences, under the "Advanced" settings (which is a button on that page) on the "general" tab there's a series of "Grouping" and "decimal" seperators you can change to whatever you want.

Maybe that will help you ngazidja?

[ngazidja]

Hi, yes, thanks, I tried that, although I'm still on High Sierra, it doesn't make any difference. Not sure why. Perhaps I need to reboot?

[ngazidja]

What's curious about this is that, having set the system preferences to the decimal separator as a comma, Nisus seems to be ambivalent about the whole thing. The decimal tab still sets to a period and not a comma, and in the character panel my font size is"12.0". But line spacing is "1,3 lin", and margins also have commas ("25,4" mm - now how metric is that?)

Martin's ignoring this. He already owes me a beer for the last problem he couldn't solve.

[martin]

I'm sorry you're having trouble with decimal-aligned tab stops. It's true that you can't directly customize the separator character (period vs comma). However the separator should automatically change based on the language attribute you've applied to your text. Your system language shouldn't affect the behavior; only the language as set within Nisus Writer.

That said, this doesn't appear to be working correctly. I'll file a bug and I expect that we can get this fixed for the next software update. Thanks for letting us know!

[martin]

Martin's ignoring this. He already owes me a beer for the last problem he couldn't solve.

What was the last unsolved problem? I can't promise a solution or a beer, but I'll certainly try!

[ngazidja]

Hi Martin, it was the problem where I click (and hold) below the bar in the scrollbar and the pages scroll upwards (or click above, and they scroll down)... It's been doing it through several versions of NWP, several OS and even two different laptops. This was years ago and we gave up on it. It must be me...

I can work around the comma/period problem in the tabbing. That's what spacebars are for!

Iain.

[martin]

Hi Martin, it was the problem where I click (and hold) below the bar in the scrollbar and the pages scroll upwards (or click above, and they scroll down)... It's been doing it through several versions of NWP, several OS and even two different laptops. This was years ago and we gave up on it. It must be me...

I certainly can't reproduce that problem. Has anyone else encountered this unexpected behavior?

We did fix a scrolling problem where the following system preference wasn't always respected:

scrollpref.png (23.24 KiB) Viewed 20822 times

But that was fixed for Nisus Writer Pro version 2.1.9 (before 3.0), some time ago. That was the last notable fix for basic scrolling. It sounds like that's not related to the behavior you're seeing.

[martin]

What's curious about this is that, having set the system preferences to the decimal separator as a comma, Nisus seems to be ambivalent about the whole thing. The decimal tab still sets to a period and not a comma, and in the character panel my font size is"12.0". But line spacing is "1,3 lin", and margins also have commas ("25,4" mm - now how metric is that?)

Nisus Writer Pro 3.0.2 should fix this issue. If you have a language applied to your text that uses commas as the decimal point, then decimal-aligned tab stops on the ruler should use a comma instead of a period.