Hacking at 0300

I had a terrible time getting the positioning for my textpopup to come out right and my solution was hacky and didn't work consistently. It seems that everyone had that problem, and the jQuery UI team solved it (yay!) for version 1.8. Enter the enhanced position. It does all the work for me and allows for much greater flexibility. One downside is that it won't work on invisible (display: none) elements, so I have to hack it with x.css({display: 'block', visibility: 'hidden'}).position(positionOptions).css({display: 'none', visibility: 'visible'}).

The other downside is that the display animation isn't as elegant: my hack involved appending the popup directly after the input box and setting the css so that the correct edge was fixed to the input box. This meant that changing the size of the popup automatically moved it into position, and the animation always appeared to grow out of the input box. Now the position is fixed absolutely, and the standard show always grows from the upper left corner. You have to manually set the animation or reposition the box. A small sacrifice for "just works."

Now, this is cool:

<p contentEditable="true">This is a test (click me)</p>

I was looking for a in-line editor (on the order of jEditable) but it turns out all the modern browsers have it built-in.

However, my sendkeys plugin doesn't work and the position of textpopupup is messed up:

<p id="hebrew" contentEditable="true">This is a test (click me)</p>

$('#hebrew').hebrewKeyboard();

More stuff to work on. Sigh

Update 2010-11-21: new textpopup now is positioned correctly. Now to update the documentation and fix sendkeys.

The bane of modern medicine is the paperwork, especially for a practice like mine that is largely Medicaid. If there's anything the government loves, it's paperwork. Fortunately, most of it is available electronically. Unfortunately, most of that is in PDF form, uneditable and closed. Sometimes the bureaucrats have thought to make it a fill-in form, but usually it needs to be printed and filled by hand. With my handwriting, that's a recipe for illegible disaster.

Comes a new website to save the day: PDFescape. It's free (Google ad-supported), all javascript-based (no Flash!), and lets you upload a PDF locally or from the web, then add text or form controls wherever you want, then save it locally. Poof, instant fill-in form! It's smooth, easy-to-use and does exactly what it claims to do. All programs/webservices should work that well.