Storyline Symbol Insertion

CUE's storyline editor includes a tool for easily inserting symbols and special characters in the storyline text: non-Latin characters, mathematical symbols, currency symbols, emojis and invisible characters such as soft hyphens and non-breaking spaces. The purpose of the symbol insertion tool is not to enable the insertion of any character (computer operating systems in any case provides methods for doing that) but to make the insertion of commonly-used special characters easy. Before you can used the symbol insertion tool, therefore, you need to configure it with a selection of the characters and symbols likely to be actually required at your installation.

Once it is configured, the symbol insertion tool provides the following capabilities:

• Keyboard shortcuts for inserting characters and symbols

• A Symbols dialog from which characters and symbols can be selected

• A function for revealing the location of invisible characters such as soft hyphens

The Symbols dialog is displayed by means of a Semantic Shortcuts (Shift Shift Y) and looks like this:

All the special characters configured for use at your site are displayed at the bottom of the dialog under All. In addition, each user's 5 most frequently used characters are displayed at the top of the dialog under Favorites. Any displayed character can be inserted by clicking on it, and hovering the mouse over a character will display its name (useful for invisible characters such as soft hyphens). There is also a Search field at the top of the dialog that you can use to search for symbols by name.

Checking the Show invisible symbols in text option highlights any invisible characters in the storyline in blue, rendering them visible. If you check or uncheck this option, then an Apply button is displayed in the dialog so that you can close the dialog and apply the change. In this way you can switch highlighting of invisible characters on and off.

Depending on how the symbol insertion tool is configured, it may also be possible to enter some characters just by pressing a keyboard shortcut, without displaying the Symbols dialog (see the description of the shortcut property below).

To enable the symbol insertion functionality, you need to add a specialChars property like this to one of your CUE configuration files:

specialChars:
- name: 'Soft Hyphen'
  icon: '­'
  invisible: true
- name: 'Left double-angle quote'
  icon: '«'
  shortcut: ["ctrl+alt+,", "command+alt+,"]
- name: 'Right double-angle quote'
  icon: '»'
  shortcut: ["ctrl+alt+.", "command+alt+."]
- name: 'Copyright'
  icon: '©'

The specialChars property must contain an array of entries defining the characters you want users to be able to insert. Each entry consists of the following properties:

name

The character/symbol name as you want it to appear in the Symbols dialog. (Required)

icon

The actual character or symbol to be inserted. (Required)

Note that in the example shown above, the icon appears to be an empty string, but is in fact a soft hyphen character (U+00AD).

shortcut

An array of one or more shortcut definitions that can be used to insert the character. Make sure to avoid shortcuts that are already used by the operating system or the browser. (Optional)

invisible

Set this to true for invisible characters that you want to be able to highlight using the Show invisible symbols in text function. (Optional)