Last week, our support desk here at Novaworks received an interesting email regarding the spacing between ampersand characters (‘&’) and the rest of the line. This space was lost when the document was printed. Through some testing, we’ve discovered that when printing a document from Internet Explorer to PDF or a normal printer, if the first character on a line of code begins a character entity or is an ampersand then the return on the line above it will not be treated as whitespace for printing purposes but instead ignored. Take the following code for example:

There are times when it may be desirable or necessary to change GoFiler’s software key or unregister it from your system. There’s no easy way to do this through the application’s GUI. One can always uninstall the software or reinstall it to apply a different key than the one attached to the current installation, but that’s time-consuming and can destroy GoFiler preferences and settings you’d like to keep. With Legato and some batch scripting, changing the software key for a GoFiler installation or unregistering the application is simple. Note: whatever software key you apply to your installation must be valid, and a valid key can only be purchased through Novaworks. Contact the support or sales departments to inquire about the status of your software key(s) or to purchase new or additional keys.

The script for this week is going to be another request by a customer. It is a good example of how to search for patterns in HTML and replace the content matching that pattern. A common task when converting an HTML document is trying to get indented paragraphs to indent at the same level. This is especially problematic when the document contains numbered paragraphs that are not hanging (such as a legal outline.) Dealing with this case isn’t exactly trivial in HTML, as it often imports with a set number of non-breaking spaces to create the indent. Unless you’re using a monospace font, the text will not perfectly align, and the outline will not look the same for every number. The best solution is to remove the non-breaking spaces, and wrap the lead-in text (the “(a)”, or “1.”, or “Section 1.”, etc) with a inline tag, using the display type “inline-block”. This, combined with a fixed width and “nowrap” properties, allows us to add a block of space that is a fixed width into a paragraph, so our lead-in text takes up exactly the right amount of space.

So far, every script we’ve explored has been a hook of some sort. They attach themselves to new or existing menu icons or are triggered by other functions being run. What if you want something to run on application start? Legato supports this through the Application Initialize script. On program start, GoFiler will always run the ApplicationStartup.ls script. This script file is the one that’s responsible for running every other script in the extensions folder. This allows users to create their own custom startup routines that are run before literally anything else.