Text input dialog and open file dialog

Scripting
1

I am looking for a way to open a dialog, especially one that asks for user’s text input, and file dialog (trying to open a text file). I thought robofab may be the way to go, but its page or robofab help didn’t get me anywhere. Could anyone teach me how to do it?

2

For file dialogs, there are the convenience methods GetOpenFile() and GetSaveFile(), more details on docu.glyphsapp.com. For a text input window, Vanilla gives you nice wrappers for the PyObjC functions.

3

Thanks, that will do for the file part. I haven’t found the text input dialog yet (I looked at vanilla help countless times yesterday, but couldn’t find it). Could you give me an example?

4

Take a peek in my Vanilla scripts, like Make OT Class from Selected Glyphs etc.

5

I had a look at it, and it’s not doing anything different from making a floating window just as usual, which is what I want to avoid. I am looking for a much simpler code sample like EasyDialogs.AskString or what’s equivalent in robofont, that works.

6

That is the type of window, not the text input. You have regular windows as well in Vanilla, try help(vanilla.Window)

7

I had a look, but I can’t find what I want. Sorry for learning slowly, but are you saying that there is no easy way and I have to recreate the dialog window?

EDIT: I recreated it anyway using vanilla.Window, but this way I can’t get the dialog to appear more than once. It gives me an error saying “can’t re-open a window”

EDIT: I could get the dialogs to show and hide. I can manage for now, but I still wish there was an easier way.

8

There is a AskString dialog in robofab. You need to import from robofab.interface.all.dialogs import AskString to be able to use it.

def AskString(message, value='', title='RoboFab'):
9

Why don’t you make your own convenience method that you can re-use?

10

That’s okay within one script, but I don’t want to make something that only works in my environment (though I think it’s okay assume everyone has robofont and vanilla, from which I have finally found stuff that work with Georg’s help. Some were implemented and others weren’t, and I had no way of knowing it just by my research).