The problem#

Google Forms is a tool that allows for easily setting up simple structured data entry. But it's designed to make it easy to analyze a lot of data that has been entered, not to view a single entry. There is a view to show individual entries, but it's very cluttered due to including all of the options that were not selected as well as those that were selected. A display that showed only the entries that were selected could be used as a quick and dirty way to make a form letter-like website.

To make this problem harder, the solution has to run on iPad, a platform not exactly known for its user programmability.

The solution#

Bookmark this link: hide unselected items in Google Form. Then select that bookmark when on the appropriate Google Forms page. Note that in addition to hiding unselected entries, if the entry that is not select has a value of "Yes", then its entire section will be hidden. If you don't want that behavior, bookmark this variant of the script instead.

The details#

Typographic ligatures#

Typographic ligatures are a feature of a font where multiple characters are combined as one to improve readability. For example, if you look closely at the ffi and fl in the following, you'll notice they look slightly different with ligatures (normal):

office, float

and without ligatures:¹

of‌f‌i‌c‌e, f‌l‌o‌a‌t

You can in fact create a font that declares any sequence of characters to be a ligature to be rendered differently. Because the difference is only at the font rendering level, copy and paste still work as expected. This allows us to choose sequences of characters that really act like single characters in a given programming language and render them as such.