Style of search character input?

Dictionary App Builder
1

I have a dictionary app where there is only one non-standard input character, the glottal, represented by U+02BC. Since most keyboards don’t have that character, I added it to the “Input Buttons” on the Language Details tab. Unfortunately, it looks like a smudge on the screen:

image
image720×603 33.5 KB

Is there any way that I can change the color of that button (or the background), to make it stick out a bit more? I’ve looked through all of the Styles, but haven’t found anything that seems to increase the contrast.

2

Under Colors \ Main Colors tab there are some search colors:

image

But as you can see, I tried some “special” colors to make them stick out in the UI, and none of the changes I made appeared anywhere in the UI that I could see.

3

I wonder if they could make the program such that one could type the apostrophe on the standard keyboard and the search procedure would recognize that as the glottal stop. Then you wouldn’t need to have a non-standard input character.

4

So you want something like this?

image

I changed the Background-color in the Styles section.

ui.search.buttons	Search Input Buttons	

font-family: font1; 
font-size: 22sp; 
font-weight: bold; 
color: SearchButtonTextColor; 
background-color: red; 
width: 30dp; 
height: 35dp; 
border: 1pt black solid;

Does that help?

5

Thanks for that, Ian. I don’t think I would choose red… but that very effectively made your point!

But I don’t see ui.search.buttons in the UI Styles tab. All I see is “ui.search-title”. Is that a style that you added in the .appdef file? And would it appear on the UI Styles tab (because it begins with “ui.”), or on the Text Styles tab, with all of the other styles that I have added (like table, th, td… for tables)? And do you need to define all of those characteristics, or can you just define background-color, and assume that the default style will provide all of the “normal” style properties for those buttons?

So it will be great to be able to address this one issue. But the bigger question is how did you know that “ui.search.buttons” was the right style to modify? Are you looking in source code somewhere which has more styles than just what are listed in DAB?

6

Well, I finally got around to testing it. I added this to the styles in the .appdef file

<style name="ui.search.buttons" category="text">
  <style-decl property="background-color" value="red"/>
</style>

When I opened DAB, that style appeared under Text Styles (not under User Interface Styles), and when I built it, it didn’t change anything in the search character input button. So I added all of the properties Ian mentioned above (just in case). Same result - no change.

So @Ian_McQuay what’s your secret for getting those fancy red character input buttons?!

7

Oh wow I did deceive you. I was testing different things in both RAB and DAB. I changed the button in RAB not DAB. And did not notice my error.

Vocation in June. That’s confirmation I need it.

8

Ah yes, I do see the style ui.search.buttons in RAB, but that doesn’t really help me in DAB. I assume that will require a code change. I’m wondering why that isn’t common code between all the app builders already, since the search dialogs are almost identical. Can you post a request for that? And then you can go on vacation… :slight_smile:

9

I have posted that issue, it is #707.

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