Basic Question: Text Field wrapping

[Brent Neal]

At 9:36 -0700 1/30/02, Scott Raney wrote:
>Only if you're developing it for monkeys or people with keyboards that
>have no spacebars.  I can't think of any reasonable need for this
>"feature" otherwise.  If a word needs to break in the middle, even a
>"moderately-featured" editor is going to have to hyphenate, or have
>the user do it manually, rather than just break the word anywhere.

Or if you're editing non-natural language text streams. Don't think 
"words".  Again, see SimpleText (a "moderately-featured" editor) for 
how its supposed to work. BBEdit (a *very* well featured editor) also 
does this correctly if you have Soft Wrap turned on. OS X TextEdit (A 
Cocoa app) behaves correctly.  That implies to me that this behavior 
should come for free with TE/WASTE (pre-X) or the Cocoa text 
rendering system.  Further, REALBasic (version 3.5.1 on Mac OS X) 
text fields also behave properly.

At 9:36 -0700 1/30/02, Scott Raney wrote:
>  Your odds of getting this feature implemented are pretty
>much dependent on couching your request in these terms.
>   Regards,
>     Scott


A Mac user will expect an editor to behave similarly to one of the 
above three programs. A Unix user used to NEdit or jEdit (not to 
mention vi or emacs!) will expect the same behavior. I really don't 
care about Windows users, but my guess is that if jEdit and NEdit act 
like this, then the basic editors (Notepad?) on Windows do as well.

  I think those are pretty compelling reasons to fix this behavior. I 
was pretty disappointed when I ran up against this limitation. I'm 
fairly sure it wasn't a problem in HyperCard, since the text fields 
in HC used the Toolbox TE, but its been 8 years since I've done any 
HC development.


Brent
-- 
Brent Neal
Geek of all Trades
"Specialization is for insects" -- Robert A. Heinlein