My Bold Script is slow

[Ian Summerfield]

I can see two major problems.   The first is you change the textStyle of
each and every character selected regardless of whether it needs it or not,
but you only really need to do that if the style was in that character in
the first place.   This speeds it up a lot.

The second is probably harder to measure, but each time round your loop the
cpu will need to recalculate your loop "from" and "to" functions,  so it's
much better programming to put the calculations before the loop and have
them calculate just the once.   See my variables "StartLoop" and "EndLoop".

Another minor thing is to use lockscreen to prevent the screen redrawing too
often.

I didn't like your two replaces,  I can see why you need them but you might
like to experiment with my alternate method of using a sort.   I just
replace "bold" in a string like "underline,italic,bold" to leave:
"underline,italic,",  I then sort by item and get ",italic,underline" and
can delete the first comma.   I don't know it's any faster,  you'll have to
experiment.  By seeing the tick count anyway it'll be easy to tell which is
quicker.

I added in some timing stuff,  so I can tell what speed it's running at.  My
tests saw your original script go from 77 ticks to 19 in my revised one,
but it depends on how large your selectedchunk is and how my characters are
bold.

on mouseUp
  put the ticks into starttime
  put "bold" into myStyle
  
  put (the second word of the selectedChunk) into loopStart
  put (the fourth word of the selectedChunk) into loopEnd

  set lockscreen to true
  set cursor to watch

  repeat with myChar = loopStart to loopEnd
    put the textStyle of char myChar of card field "text" into myRepeat
    if myStyle is in myRepeat then
      replace myStyle with "" in myRepeat
      sort items of myRepeat -- there'll be an empty item
      delete char 1 of myRepeat -- it's a comma for the empty item
      set the textstyle of char myChar of card field "text" to myRepeat
    end if
  end repeat
  set lockscreen to false
  put the ticks-starttime
end mouseUp

On 2/2/02 11:09 pm, "Björnke von Gierke" <bvg at mac.com> scribed:

> Well, my bold Script is really slow, and I would appreciate any input
> for making it faster. Concrete are the loops at the bottom the problem,
> but I don't know an other way to change the bold, but leave other styles
> alone, as the forever-be-damned-and-burn-in-hell "textstyle" property is
> set to the uglier-as-my-dogs-ass "mixed" state.
> 
> here it comes, please be aware, that any brain injures caused by this
> script are the brain owners problem:
> 
> on mouseUp
>    repeat with myChar = the second word of the selectedChunk to the
> fourth word of the selectedChunk
>      put the textStyle of char myChar of field "text" into myRepeat
>      replace myStyle & "," with "" in myRepeat
>      replace myStyle with "" in myRepeat
>      set the textstyle of char myChar of field "text" to myRepeat
>    end repeat
> end mouseUp
> 
> note:
> I tried the "for each char" loop, but it was not applicable the way i
> used it. (it provided always the character, but no number or other
> location possibility)
> for better reading copy to a button and tab on each line.
> for use set the traversalon to false
> 
> hope you find something faster...
> 
> _______________________________________________
> use-revolution mailing list
> use-revolution at lists.runrev.com
> http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution

----------------------------------
Ian Summerfield
Macintosh Consultant - Hastings UK
ICQ: 4378866
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