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Text Styling

Working with styled text

Issue: 5.2 (January/February 2007)
Author: Marc Zeedar
Author Bio: Marc taught himself programming in high school when he bought his first computer but had no money for software. He's had fun learning ever since.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 15,616
Starting Page Number: 34
Article Number: 5212
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5212.zip Updated: 2007-01-15 13:16:39

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Excerpt of article text...

For years REALbasic supported styled text in EditFields -- that is, text with various fonts, sizes, and other characteristics like bold and italic -- but there was no easy mechanism for you, the programmer, to access those details. Figuring out styled text was a complicated adventure of parsing the TextStyleData string within a memoryblock -- not for the faint of heart. That changed a few years ago when REALbasic introduced the StyledText class.

For those of you new to the whole concept of styled text, let's explore the medium for a minute. It will greatly help your understanding later.

Now plain text is easy -- it's just a string of characters:

The fast fox flounced across the flooded freeway.

With REALbasic's advanced string handling, you really don't even have to worry about text encoding, like whether some text is double-byte (i.e. Chinese, where each character is represented by a two-byte number). REALbasic's string handling routines handle all that stuff for you, so you just treat text as text and everything just works. (I'll still never get over my amazement when an early user of my Z-Write word processor, in 1999, sent me a screen shot of Z-Write working right-to-left with Hebrew text. I, of course, had done nothing extra to support Hebrew: it just worked.)

Once we get into styled text, however, our simple plain text has gotten complicated. Take a few seconds and think about how styled text must work: because the text can now be styled with various fonts, text sizes, and other characteristics, there needs to be a way to indicate the style information before each block of text. Each time a style change happens, we need new style information. Something like this (the details in brackets [ ] are the style info):

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