Multiline brace

[rwg]

I need to have a single (left) brace that spans several lines of text. Can this be done in Nisus? And if not, any suggestions for the easiest way to achieve this would be much appreciated.

[Elbrecht]

HI -

it depends on your setting & I've never had to do it myself. But the elements of multiline braces are part of Unicode 239B thru 23B1 - you can enter in Nisus Writer with "EDIT / CONVERT / From Unicode Code Points" - I prefer PopChar utility for this. You need to look for a font offering these brace things though - have a look in Font Book for this. And I would think of placing brace & text in two-part TABLE - maybe?

HE

[rwg]

Thanks for the pointer to the Unicode brace elements. By fiddling with font sizes and baselines I think I may be able to achieve what I want. Otherwise I'll try your suggestion for using a table.

[xiamenese]

An alternative entry method, if you don't need to do this frequently, is to go to <Keyboard Preferences" and from the <Keyboard> pane enable "Show keyboard and character viewers in the menu bar". You will find a "flag" icon for your current language at the right hand end of the menu bar and if you click on that, <Show Character Viewer> will appear. In the list on the left, it should show "( ) Parentheses - All" which gives you the various glyphs for drawing any kind of bracket/parenthesis/brace over any number of lines. Choosing one of them brings up on the right another pane which shows all the fonts that include that glyph.

By clicking on the gear icon on the top left, you can manage which character sets available on your computer are shown, including the ability to display them all in Unicode or UTF-8 coding.

I find this very useful for entering odd symbols and glyphs I don't need all the time, or for finding out the unicode code point of a glyph.

Mark

[martin]

Another solution: place a single brace character inside a floating text box and have the box float alongside the paragraph. You can adjust the font size of that single brace character so it's large enough to span multiple lines.

Another idea, that involves a little more work, is that you could create a PDF graphic of this brace and then float it alongside the paragraph. The upside of using a graphic is that you can resize it arbitrarily to be whatever size and aspect ratio you need. Because a graphic format like PDF or EPS is vector-based, there won't be any loss in quality when it becomes large, even when printing. The downside is that you'll first have to create such a PDF, and it won't be easy to change the brace's font family, color, etc.