red colour marks with characters when typing

edited January 2009 in Science & Tech
Wondering if you could help or direct us to who could help.

We would like to place red colour dots (and other different red marks depending-) above or below a character (black colour) when typing in word documents.

Is this possible?


Comments

  • kryystkryyst Ontario, Canada
    edited January 2009
    Not beyond just manually sticking dots there. You can't have a mixed color font which is essentially what your asking. About the closest you could get is to change the color of the leter/word itself.
  • CBCB Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ Der Millionendorf- Icrontian
    edited January 2009
    Sorry to contradict, Kryyst.

    Word 2007 does allow the user to change the underline color independent of the font color. Still no way to give it an over-line since that's not a standard part of text formatting, but you might be able to figure out something that looks close to what you want if you play around with tables and different buffers and border types.
    attachment.php?attachmentid=26656&stc=1&d=1232560192
  • kryystkryyst Ontario, Canada
    edited January 2009
    Yes true, I forgot about the ability to change the underline character. That's not just limited to 2007 either, works in OpenOffice and previous versions of Microsoft Office as well.
  • edited January 2009
    Thanks CB and kryyst for answering.

    Is it possible then to change/add to the underline style - a dot or an 45degree slash?

    ie what do you mean play with the tables, buffers etc?

    Or add to or change the Effects?
  • kryystkryyst Ontario, Canada
    edited January 2009
    No not really you are pretty limited to what you can do font wise. and with the underline rules.

    Maybe if you provide a larger example of the what/why you are trying to do we may be able to give you more suggestions.
  • CBCB Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ Der Millionendorf- Icrontian
    edited January 2009
    reshan wrote:
    Thanks CB and kryyst for answering.

    Is it possible then to change/add to the underline style - a dot or an 45degree slash?

    ie what do you mean play with the tables, buffers etc?

    Or add to or change the Effects?

    I mean that if you put text inside of a table, and mess with the settings (experimentation is fun) you might be able to do something that resembles what you want. for example, with a few seconds of tweaking the 'borders and shading' options, I got this:

    attachment.php?attachmentid=26657&stc=1&d=1232594335

    However, as kryyst said: if you give us more details about your project, we might be able to help more.
  • edited January 2009
    We are typing some Aramaic lessons.
    The pages are a mix of mainly English and some Aramaic words.
    With some of the Aramaic words we would like to put small round dots above or below a letter to emphasize a change in sound for that consonant.
    Sometimes we would also like to place a red 45degree slash under or above to indicate another sound change to that consonant (Aramaic).
    We would like to type these red marks as we type.


    We use for English the font Arial and for Aramaic - East Syriac Adiabene
  • edited January 2009
    Wondering if you could help or direct us to who could help.

    We would like to place red colour dots (and other different red marks depending-) above or below a character (black colour) when typing in word documents.

    Is this possible?
  • leishi85leishi85 Grand Rapids, MI Icrontian
    edited January 2009
    type something in ms word, and then select the text u want to underline, and chose underline. and then select the underlined text and right click and then fonts. in the new windows, change the setting in underline style to the dotted lines, and then in the underline color setting chose red.
  • leishi85leishi85 Grand Rapids, MI Icrontian
    edited January 2009
    disregard what i just said, just saw your other thread.
  • edited January 2009
    Thanks leishi85 for taking the time to reply.

    Appreciate all the help.
  • kryystkryyst Ontario, Canada
    edited January 2009
    That does help. Unfortunatley I can't think of any easy way to do what you want. About the best suggestion I can think of would be to use a combination of different fonts, Underline, Bold and Italic with different font colours on those letters to create emphasis. Doing anything more it almost sounds to me like you would need to make your own custom font set. Which may be a future project worth looking into you if those are features you'll continuously need down the road.

    Now I said I can't think of an easy way to do it. The only way I can think of to do exactly what you want would be to type out your original document using 1.5 spacing and a fairly good sized font of 14. Then go in after the fact with the draw tool and add in your markings.

    Alternatively you could doble space everything and do something like this

    . / _ \
    This is the text I want to accent
    / - \

    Neither way is perfect but it'll get you there.
  • CBCB Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ Der Millionendorf- Icrontian
    edited January 2009
    Kryyst is right.

    I thought you were talking about adding to lines, but you want to be able to do this with individual accent marks, that's tough.

    I would recommend thinking about the scope of that project. It would take a lot of work to do it just that way. As Kryyst describes, you would have to draw the lines manually, or come up with a complicated line-sequence.

    Would it work for your project to change the color of the whole letter, instead of just the accent mark?

    Like:

    See spot fix his resumé.
  • LincLinc Owner Detroit Icrontian
    edited January 2009
    Discussions merged; please keep to one discussion per topic :) It's confusing to have it in multiple places.
  • edited January 2009
    First off - sorry Keebler about doing that - new at this - desperate to get some help etc

    We've tried drawing in marks - however its not a good way to do it because every time there might be a change to the document - a word or a line inserted later etc - then all those drawn dots and dashes move - anywhere. In a document of 30 or more pages its hard to back track and move the dots and dashes back to the original letter - there doesn't seem to be a way to anchor these drawings to the Aramaic letter???!
    [Even with different printers those dots may move! Also its hard to place those drawn dots in the same place with words that are the same throughout the lesson.]

    So that's the reason we want to be able to type these dots and dashes as we go.....

    Does this mean we need to create a font ?
    Not afraid to do the work - as in the long term it will be the best - however we dont know how to do this.
    Just need a few tips in the right direction.

    By the way CB - highlights and individual letter coloured as you suggest had already been suggested to the teacher/lesson writer - but was not an acceptable option.
  • CBCB Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ Der Millionendorf- Icrontian
    edited January 2009
    Unfortunately, at this point in time, this instructor is asking too much, and here's why:

    The only way to get exactly what this instructor wants would be to have a font that has two colors in it (I guess Kryyst understood this is what you were asking for in the first place, which is why he told you it couldn't be done).

    Font files are basically a set of graphics, which the different programs rely upon to display text characters. These files, unlike other graphics files, contain no color information at all. The display color is based on the settings in the program, and can only be modified one full character at a time.

    While I was thinking about this problem, I called up a contact who knows a lot more about fonts than I do (he works with and even creates fonts as part of his business) to make sure that there is nothing else to try, and he assured me that what this instructor is asking for is not possible without drawing on the document in some way afterward (he actually recommended using Corel to rasterize the document, then just click on each of the marks with a fill tool, but that still wouldn't leave the document editable).

    If I were in your place, I would bring all this information to the instructor, and ask them again if they would be okay with a different solution.
  • kryystkryyst Ontario, Canada
    edited January 2009
    Yeah I mean I hate to say 'no' to most computer problems. But there are times when that is just the case. It's not that you can't create an end document to look like what you want it to do. But a custom font would be the only way to recreate that document in an editable format that will adjust spacing letters etc... The problem with a custom font is that you can't have more then one colour in a font.

    So the closest you are going to get would be to create a custom font set with all the letters and various accent combinations for them so if you had the letter a with 4 different . / \ _ combinations you'd have to have 4 of those in the font and map it out to various versions of it like a, shift+a etc.... you could then colour that whole letter.

    But I hope you are seeing that just from what you need to do once you have the font created it's still a huge amount of work to type out a 30 page document like that. As CB said you should speak to your instructor and if this is his requirement maybe have him shed some light on performing the impossible. I should also add that creating a custom font in and of itself is a significant undertaking and conceivably more work then writing up your document in the first place.
  • edited January 2009
    Thanks for the help everyone.
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