Posted by Benjamin Niemann on 08/27/05 18:50

dalei wrote:

> When typing several numbers in the textarea of form, I need them change
> to superscripts. Could anyone teach me how to ahieve the effects.

You can't do this (really) with a textarea. The only exception are
superscript 1, 2 and 3 for which there are characters available in
iso-8859-1 (can be entered with alt-1, -2 and -3 on my keyboard layout).
Don't know, if unicode defines more superscript numbers and if these are
present in commonly used fonts.

Another solution would be to allowed (a subset of) HTML in the text entered,
so a user can enter things like "foo⁴⁷¹¹" - this will only make
sense, if the text is supposed to be displayed as HTML again. And you will
have to worry about various security issues (malicious JS code insertion by
an attacker), so you have to parse the submitted text an filter all HTML
tags that are not whitelisted.

The latter option could be made more comfortable for users with
IE/NS/Firefox and JS enabled by using a so called WYSIWYG component which
replaces the textarea by a "MS Word" style editing area. Such components
are available as open source (http://freshmeat.net/search/?q=wysiwyg+html).

--
Benjamin Niemann
Email: pink at odahoda dot de
WWW: http://www.odahoda.de/

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