Removing “small caps” from a Google Docs document

April 4th, 2018

If you’ve battled with documents imported to Google Docs, you’ve probably come across a document which features formatting that is shown, but is not editable in Google Docs. A typical example is “small caps” – that typographic style where all letters are transformed into capitals, but actual capital letters looks bigger. Like this, if you take the sentence “This Is Small Caps”:

This Is Small Caps

Probably wisely, Google Docs doesn’t support this. However, because it doesn’t, getting rid of it is tricky if it’s embedded in a style (let’s say a Heading 1). Clearing formatting doesn’t work. However, I’ve found the solution (which also doesn’t require any add-ons):

  1. Create some plain (non-small caps) text
  2. Copy that text (Ctrl-C)
  3. Paste it into the middle of an example of the offending small caps text (Ctrl-V). The pasted text should retain its non small-caps style, but will still be classed as being Heading 1 text
  4. Make sure your cursor is in the non-small caps text you just pasted
  5. Right click -> “Update ‘Heading 1’ to match”. Bingo!

Using GNOME 3 (GNOME shell) with a VNC client

April 13th, 2015

Sometimes I have a need to access a running GNOME 3 desktop from another client running GNOME 3, using VNC. This can be tricky since GNOME 3 is heavily dependent on the use of the “Super” (Windows) key and even when you are using the remote machine’s desktop, pressing the Super key results in the local GNOME overview being brought up. Similarly for Alt-Tab, you end up switching local applications rather than applications on the remote desktop.

After a bit of searching I found a question about remapping the Super key on ask.fedoraproject.org. The question is what to remap it to (I didn’t want to disable it altogether).

Sharing the best solution I found, I found the following sufficient to get a usable remote desktop:

  • Remap the “Super” key on the remote desktop to the “Menu” key (if the local client has that key) – gsettings set org.gnome.mutter overlay-key “Menu”
  • Using the GNOME 3 keyboard settings, in Shortcuts -> Mapping -> Navigation, change “Switch Windows” from Alt+Tab to Ctrl+Tab.

This doesn’t solve everything, perhaps due to the way keyboard combinations are handled with VNC e.g. the menu bar can’t be brought up by <Menu>+M, but it’s good enough.

In this case the local machine was running Fedora 20 and the remote machine RHEL7.