I can't believe that in 2009, with version 8.5, we still can't programmatically add bullets to a Rich Text Field!

I know, Genii has a solution for this.  But how hard can it be to add simple bullet capability to the NotesRichTextParagraphStyle object?  We can apply fonts to the NotesRichTextStyle objects, after all, as well as bold, underline, strikethrough, colors, ...

1. Ben Langhinrichs06/04/2009 08:13:38 AM
Homepage: http://www.GeniiSoft.com/showcase.nsf/GeniiBlog

Well, to be fair, the "Genii solution" (our Midas Rich Text LSX, for those who live in a cave somewhere) didn't offer this when first released. I looked it up - we only added the ability to programmatically add bullets in Version 1.10, which we released in Nov. 1997 for Notes 4.1. So, IBM is only twelve years behind... so far.

An even bigger mystery to me is how IBM had managed to avoid support in the rich text classes for nested tables, which have been supported by Notes since R5, before most of the rich text classes were even written.

2. Michael Sobczak06/04/2009 08:41:07 AM
Homepage: http://www.punkdbynotes.com

Hi Ben,

Didn't mean to be dismissive of Midas. It seems like an awesome product from what I've read over the years.

While I appreciate the Notes Rich Text classes were added in V6, I felt at the time that the way they designed them really what programmers could do. I have to wonder if Lotus can't revise them to include nested tables because of the way that they were originally designed...

3. Ben Langhinrichs06/04/2009 10:19:23 AM
Homepage: http://www.GeniiSoft.com/showcase.nsf/GeniiBlog

I didn't think you were dismissive. I appreciate your mentioning Midas at all.

The biggest problem with the Notes rich text classes has always been their way of targeting rich text. You can't even say the first cell of the first row of the second table, you have to say the 43rd cell. That doesn't map well to the way people think, and it makes nested cell support virtually impossible. What I have never understood is why they have not added a new target scheme that is more flexible. There is little technical difficulty in supporting nested tables, but the target difficulty makes it almost impossible.

Oh, and sorry to hijack your post. Go bullets. They could add that support very easily.

4. Patrick Picard06/04/2009 01:14:27 PM

It does indeed stink that little things like this are missing. I blogged about this 2-3 days ago!

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Is it possible to create an email in LS and set the type to text/html ....then using ol and li elements would do...

5. Michael Sobczak06/04/2009 04:17:47 PM
Homepage: http://www.punkdbynotes.com

You would need to create the MIME parts first, and populate them with your HTML. Then you can send the message out. You may want to search on creating MIME messages in Notes to see if there's some free articles on it someplace. There was a good article in the Advisor on this a few years back.

6. Patrick Picard06/05/2009 10:27:33 AM

Michael, thanks for the reference. Found the link. That should get me started :)

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