Maybe you can stripe candy canes too, given it’s the season. However, this blog post is talking about striping tables! We had another feature request for GoFiler last week that we thought would make a good blog post. This request concerned developing a way for GoFiler to start striping the table after the first dollar sign in the table instead of at the normal body position that GoFiler detects. There are two ways we could do this: we could spend a lot of time modifying a core function of GoFiler, the Polish Table function, or we could make a Legato script that fires on post-process and re-does the striping of the table. The latter is preferable because it doesn’t affect other uses who perhaps don’t want or need this feature. Anyone who does can simply add this script to the extensions folder and that user can get the benefits of a new features.

Here at Novaworks, we often get requests for features to add to GoFiler. Our topic this week is a client request that I think is another good example of how to use Legato to do some HTML parsing and modification. The original request was to have a way to detect paragraphs within table cells with underlines (border-bottom property) or underline tags in them. It would be great to remove the underlines from the paragraphs and put them on the table cell with the paragraphs instead. This script will work with two selection modes in an HTML file: you can either drag-select the table cells on which you want to run it, or you can click in a cell and run the script without selecting anything. Our script takes the start of your selection and finds the previous table cell. Then, working from that point until the end of the current cell or your selection, it locates any paragraphs with underlines or underline tags. If it finds them, it removes them and puts them in the table cell instead.

When using GoFiler to do filings that have series and classes in them, using the library function is a lot faster than manually adding each series and each class one at a time. The GoFiler series/class library also has the ability to look up a single CIK at a time and download the series and class information associated with it from the SEC. But what if you have a large list of CIKs, and want to add all of them to the series and classes library at once? Well, using Legato, we can run a lookup on each CIK in the input list and, with the response, build a library file which we can then import into GoFiler.

Last week, we explored editing SGML properties with Legato. By using some of the Legato SDK functions, we can read the properties of an SGML tag and change those properties to new values. This is pretty simple and straightforward. However, what if we want to do something based on a particular setting? For example, what if we want to employ an “Indent Body of Paragraph” function, where the first line of the paragraph doesn’t move but the subsequent lines are indented? We can’t simply read the indent value and add to it because we cannot guarantee that the same unit of measurement is being used. We need to read the unit, normalize it into a standard unit, add to it, convert it back to the original measurement style, and write it back out. It’s a bit more involved than simply setting properties, but it lets us perform some pretty interesting operations.

In past blog posts, we’ve used Legato to remove HTML tags or to add new ones. One function we haven’t really explored is looking at a tag and changing its properties. Editing CSS properties with Legato is extremely powerful because it lets us change the document’s appearance in clean, interesting, and intelligent ways. This week’s script is a very basic but very powerful example of this concept.