@ZachSaucier More people will be online soon. You might find it useful to check the library for general art and design books around the subject. Especially where they critically analyse design work. What works and what doesn't is a bit subjective so it could be a difficult question to answer.

It probably depends how it's asked.

Question to InDes users. I have a typeface (Gotham) with alternate characters. In this case, I want to use the alternate 'a'. Is there a way to always use it by default, or is find and replace the only option?

@marcusdoesstuff Do you want to use all alternatives or just the letter "a"? There might be a way to do it with GREP, I've never tried though

Found this which seems to be your exact question: indesignsecrets.com/topic/alternate-glyph-in-para-style

@ZachSaucier A question about asymmetry could be interesting but you'll need to find some specific question. So far all you're saying is a question about using it. I think that'll be too broad. Of course these days it seems people will answer anything.

just the 'a' in this situation

@Ryan

See that link Marcus, its your exact question

Might even be worth posting on here even if you answer it yourself

want to use the 'a' with a round counter rather than the double stacked one :)

@marcusdoesstuff yes I realize that... did you click the link I posted?

yep. working through it.

still a bit slow with typing with this new layout, heh.

@ryan character style sets do seem to work. it's a bit of a weird system though. thanks for finding that.

Anyone know of an actual free opensource CRM system? Seems all of the ones I find listed either never were or changed to subscriptions.

might be decent freemium ones perhaps...

if you only need really basic functunality

blog.capterra.com/free-and-open-source-crm

well I'm looking for OpenSource so could always write up additional functionality ourselves. What we need is fairly basic. Just somewhere to store contacts, when we met them, and if they've already received our basic informational package and when. We just don't want to keep sending the same information over and over to people.

@ZachSaucier what would be the simplest way to create a drop down based on a previous drop down? I guess AJAX is going to be needed so the page doesn't refresh. I have the values for the second drop-down in a CSV but I'm open to any solution that's easy. It's State Selection then County Selection.

Found bitrepository.com/… but not sure if its an elegant solution or not. Seems a bit clunky having all of those .js files just to make it a tad faster

I don't know of any libraries or anything but XHR definitely wouldn't be required

XHR?

the non-buzzword name for AJAX

XMLHttpRequest

oh guess I don't understand. I thought if you have a site updating without refreshing it has to use ajax

or XHR

if I were to do it from scratch, I'd structure that CSV into JSON as a nested tree, then set an event listener to fire whenever the value of the parent select value changes

and populate the child select element with values from the JSON object

hmm I'll have to look into how to do it that way

oh and hello, how was your weekend?

you would only need to use XHR if you wanted to keep the values on the server, but in this case you'd be better off just sending everything from the start to avoid the unnecessary requests

hey! it was alright

I can try and put together a codepen later

that be cool if it doesn't take you long otherwise don't worry about it. I'm making good progress figuring this stuff out

made a Database, established a PDO connection, queried the database with prepared statements, if else statement if no results are found, and now have a working form just not dropdown on the counties yet.

currently I'm looking into making a second null check to display website since not all rows have a website

@Ryan codepen.io/anon/pen/jPzLOY

@JohnB you the man!

no problem

I hard coded the initial county values but they could easily be dynamically populated as well on window load or whatever

our old dealer locator thing was written with PHP 4 and CSV. It's over 600 lines of the ugliest PHP I've ever seen including switches and cases for each state

maybe PHP3 :\

heh yeah I try to avoid PHP

that does sound nasty. It can definitely be handled more elegantly if you let the browser to the work

well my PHP / MySQL stuff is only 32 lines handling most of it now just by doing

SELECT * FROM companies WHERE state=:state AND counties LIKE :county

sounds like it might be an ancient bit of code from when JavaScript was not so popularly used for web design

PHP has a built in utility to convert PHP arrays into JSON, you could build all the states/counties as an array in PHP then use that to send it to the client as JSON

php.net/manual/en/function.json-encode.php

Wouldn't it be easier to just use the javascript you just made?

it would work in tandem with that. If you're storing this stuff in a SQL database

so pull it from the data base with PHP and build it into an array then convert it to JSON to be used with something like that codepen

oh I don't have the states and counties in a database.

ah ok nm then

The database is Company Name, Phone, Website, Counties

counties would be like "Baldwin, Clarke, Conecuh, Escambia, Mobile, Monroe, Washington"

I'd like to get that better as well but its in a much larger and messier database used by our office manager... made in Access 97

ick

she wants to fix it too, just going to take some serious time before it gets done

I'm guessing it was a "if it ain't broke" situation?

I dont even know anymore but I've convinced her to upgrade. We're just a small shop and neither of us are IT/Database Administrators doing this

hmm I added your code inside my html using <script type="text/javascript">Code</script> after the form but not working

any console errors?

I'm not really good at that sort of thing. I hit Ctrl+Shift+J and it doesn't show anything

here it is all on one page but I'm not sure that will help you jsbin.com/gonufutuye

if you can send me your full HTML page I can take a look

I solved it

somewhat

@Ryan Just got your message. Still wanting input?

ya I got it now. Just have to add all of the other counties

@ZachSaucier sure though JohnB helped a fair bit, his solution seems a lot better than that link

(I've only got 10 minutes now though before we lock up for the day)

heh

the only downside to doing it like that is searchability @Ryan. If I were doing it I'd likely have all in the HTML by default, only showing one based on the first select

and maintainability

searching through JS for HTML is no fun

but the approach linked isn't bad

fair point

If we had a CSS parent selector you could do it easily in pure CSS

but, if JS were not allowed, we'd have to make a ghetto non-select-element with funny checkbox hack

that's no fun

Sorry, I have to go now. 5 and all. I'll read more about what you mean later though

Feel bad leaving when you just showed up :(

lol, don't feel bad

@GiantCowFilms 20WPM. Boom! haha

@marcusdoesstuff Huh?

@GiantCowFilms i mentioned colemak the other day :P

@marcusdoesstuff Still confused....

re: a keyboard layout change

Ah there we go

:)

it's agony at times but i'm slowly building up some muscle memory.