Is there a way to make one part of the text in the text component in the builder bold? Couldn’t find the right information on how to do this. Is there a way (in the component or otherwise in a new code component?)?
Unfortunately there is not, bold is a property of the entire text component, not of each letter, so you can only set it to be either all bold or all not. Now that we have a Textbox component which deals with each letter as it’s own “glyph”, this is more possible to implement, but the Textbox is still very new and only in Beta.
You could create a separate component just for the letter you want to be bold and line it up to precisely where it should be, but you’d have to be very careful with Position, especially if you’re conducting this experiment across multiple different displays.
Thank you for your response. Good to know then I will not spend any more time looking for solutions. I will try and otherwise just not make it bold, the option with space sounds as if they could cause errors/ugly screens.
However, if I want to make text bold, how can I do this in the text component? I tried different codes but the programm did not react. Or should this be in a code component?
If you replace your Text component with the new Textbox component then that has an attribute called “bold”, currently it’s under Format but (especially as it’s in Beta) we may be moving it soon.
Addendum: in the new TextBox2 you can make a single letter bold as well! I’ve set it to use the old-school html tags of <b></b> around the letters you want bold (and similarly <i></i> for italics). Note that this is a “fake” bold/italic where we don’t actually use the font designer’s bold character. Instead we take the regular character and just make it 10% wider than usual!
I think, you’d need to use a code component. I couldn’t find online documentation, but from the interactive shell in the coder view, you can read the docstring with:
Is there a way to also get this to work with text pulled from a conditions file or code? I’m getting a syntax error whenever there’s a $ in the textbox.
$ doesn’t quite mean “this is a variable” it means “treat this (all) as code”
In your case the code you want would be one of the following (they are equivalent):
"<i> "+Word+" </i> - "+captured_string
"<i> %s </i> - %s" %(Word, captured_string)
"<i> {} </i> - {}".format(Word, captured_string)
f"<i> {Word} </i> - {captured_string}"
If you need JavaScript to work then you should use the first one. The last one is the neatest but requires Python3 (which you probably have) and you need to note the little f at the beginning of the quotation. These are known in python as f-strings or formatted strings.
Take one of those options and precede the whole thing with $ in your dialog box like this: $f"<i> {Word} </i> - {captured_string}"
You can do something that approximates an underline using unicode character \u0332 after each letter you want underlined. So you can do this: text = "H\u0332e\u0332l\u0332l\u0332o\u0332 was underlined"
to get 'H̲e̲l̲l̲o̲ was underlined'
but these are characters with underscores and the exact look will depend on the font being used. The lines may or may not quite touch and they may or may not be on the same vertical position depending on the font creator’s decisions.
To make it easier to read your own text you can use this funky code: '\u0332'.join('Hello')+'\u0332'
which is using the underscore to “join” all the letters in the word “Hello” (so it puts 1 in between each character) and then adding one more to handle the final character
Similar options with other chars: '\u0331'.join('Hello')+'\u0331' non-joined underline: 'H̱e̱ḻḻo̱' '\u0336'.join('Hello')+'\u0336' strike-through: 'H̶e̶l̶l̶o̶' '\u0333'.join('Hello')+'\u0333' double underline: 'H̳e̳l̳l̳o̳'
When I tried print('\u0332'.join('Hello')+'\u0332') in psychopy coder python shell, I got the following error:
>>> print('\u0332'.join('Hello')+'\u0332')
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
File "C:\Program Files\PsychoPy\lib\encodings\cp1252.py", line 19, in encode
return codecs.charmap_encode(input,self.errors,encoding_table)[0]
UnicodeEncodeError: 'charmap' codec can't encode character '\u0332' in position 1: character maps to <undefined>
When I tried $'\u0332'.join('Hello')+'\u0332' in a Builder textbox, I got a format error (attached image).
I’m currently using Psychopy v2022.1.3 standalone installed on Windows 10.
On Python, it’s clear that the TextBox will need some more work in order to support these combining characters, because they’re technically 2 characters that know how to print as 1. We’ll look into it but that won’t be until at least the next winter release (Jan/Feb 2023)
On PsychoJS (online) I haven’t yet tried to see what happens. It may “just work” there!
should this already work online?
I have text defined in a code component, as text variation depends on the group participants are in. I tried: text = “blabla part of the text in bold blabla” but it doesn’t work. I also tried puting f in front: text = $f"…" and wrap “part of the text in bold” between { }. Am I doing something wrong or is this a Pavlovia problem?
I’m afraid that means the feature isn’t yet working on the web version of the library (which was a complete rewrite to use JavaScript instead of Python). In that case the workaround options are:
either use multiple Textboxes, with one of them set to the bold test and others set to the not bold text
generate images of what you want to present (if there aren’t too many) and present those images instead
Although option 2 will take longer it has the benefit of allowing you to specify the formatting of your text completely
