I know we have background shapes, but I’m not fond of them as once I fill them, it is difficult for me to edit inside of them. I assume this is a “me” problem, but I’d love an alternative- brackets.
I’d love to be able to make a bracket (you know, this thing: } )as big or small as I want as a visual cue that what it’s pointing to is all a group. I imagine implementing this would not be hard? I’m honestly surprised it doesn’t already exist.
And I know brackets are useful, because in the screencap of the new windows beta for scapple, you literally use a bracket!!
I just made the bracket in that screenshot by typing one in, and then setting the font size really high. I am curious what more a dedicated feature would provide than that? And unlike such a feature, this approach is one that allows for many tens of thousands of symbols.
I used a png bracket file and dragged onto scapple and resized to make large enough to surround comment or in this case background shape (magnetic) with notes inside. I tried two different styles when drag over the background shape the connecting line disappears.
Playing colorized bracket and added png question mark, small is original size when dragged onto scapple and larger size is expanded size without image degradation
The next update for Windows (only) will have much better support for SVG graphics as well, allowing them to be scaled to any size and remain crisp. The current beta build isn’t quite there yet, it imports at a fixed sized based on the SVG document scale, but one could get started with that approach with the understanding that it will potentially be a little blurry until the improved behaviour is available.
PNG images are bitmaps, so they will blur once you get beyond their maximum size, and will blur to some degree when making them smaller as well, as the display engine must throw away pixels on the fly. Vector graphics on the other hand are instructions for drawing a shape—much like how a font works—and so there is no discarding or expanding of pixels to match the intended size. Like a font letter, it has the same degree of crispness whether it is the size of a billboard or a postage stamp.
Greetings Amber. Hope all is well. I’m wondering what you mean by “typing one in” (that is, bracket)? I just download the new version of Scapple (wonderful–thanks to you and L & L) and I’m trying to figure out how to incorporate brackets and other figures into Scapple. I know I’m missing something in this thread. Thanks as always for your help. --Joe
It’s a regular Scapple note that contains only the curly bracket character. How you type that will differ by keyboard language and layout; on a US-English QWERTY layout, a left (open) curly bracket is typed with Shift+[, on a French AZERTY it’s AltGr+4. You can find it in the Windows Character Map from Scapple via Edit ▸ Special Characters... and ticking the checkbox to enable Advanced view, then entering “007B” in the Go to Unicode box. From there you can copy the character to enter into the Scapple note. You can dig up lots of other interesting typographical characters this way, too.
Once you have the character in the note, you can use the inspector to adjust the font and font size, etc. If you’ve left Auto-size notes enabled in the Options, then once you finish editing, the width of the note box will snap down to just what it needs to be to fit the bracket; otherwise you can select the note and resize it yourself or use Notes ▸ Auto-Fit. You can also use the Notes ▸ Bring To Front and Send To Back commands to refine the way your bracket note overlaps with other notes on the board.
Many thanks Jennifer for your thorough response. Much appreciated. I now have a much better sense on how to incorporate brackets, braces and other symbols. Thanks again. --Joe
