justify text

[Richard Gaskin]

xbury.cs at clearstream.com wrote:
> You can get the length of any part of the field (word, items) with some 
> exceptions
> 
> put the  formattedwidth of word 3 of  fld 1
> 
> so you can recurse and find what you need. 
> But after line 1... you have to fake the justification by breaking 
> paragraph 1 into 
> it's line components. Then adjust the formattedwidth of each line by 
> inserting
> spaces between the words (will look ugly!) so it matches the "effective 
> formattedwidth" of the field. 
> 
> If you resize the field, it's all broken, start over...
> 
> It's easy with monospace fonts and a fixed width. 

Under the hood, a lot of paragraph-level formatting is roughly akin to 
having multiple TextEdit records displayed at one time (for those Mac 
ToolBox fans out there, yes, I know that's a very loose analogy; please 
forgive).

So to get this effect in Rev you could use multiple fields in a 
scrolling group.  It won't do much for you if you need to edit text
(hats off to anyone who could script such an interface gracefully), but 
for display it can be an acceptable workaround while we wait for that 
enhancement.

> But other factors such as the runrev definition of a word (which grabs any 
> chars together regardless of punctuation, or grammar rules as a single word) 
> will make this a nightmare to parse!

The traditional HyperTalk definition of a word attempts to provide 
convenience for isolating quoted strings.  If you need a more accurate 
word count you can put the text into a var, replace the quotes with a 
non-printing character like some low ASCII char and then parse the 
string, replacing those low-ASCII chars with quotes again for display.

I sometimes find the "token" chunk type useful.  While most xTalk 
implementations only support chars, words, and lines, Transcript also 
provides a token type, so if you type something like this in the Message 
Box:

   put token 2 of "Hello, world!"

...you get ","

Its use for parsing common text is limited, but in some cases it can be 
valuable.  Worth knowing about, anyway; sooner or later it'll come in 
handy, if not for the problem at hand than for something else down the road.

--
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Media Corporation
  __________________________________________________
  Rev tools and more: http://www.fourthworld.com/rev