Text Fields?

[Richmond Mathewson]

In Plovdiv, Bulgaria, computer-related reading in English s not overly
abundant; so when I chanced upon Bruce W. Perry's "AppleScript in a 
Nutshell" (O'Reilly, 2001) going for about £2, I leapt upon it like the
 proverbial drowning man.

So, when not working or reading sensible books ("Tartuffe" just at the 
moment), I have been dipping in and out of this book (we all know that 
computer manuals are not meant to be read in a linear fashion).

ANYWAY: came to the section on scripting TextEdit (why one would actually
want to do this escapes me) and suddenly felt a bit cheesed-off:

there, among the ELEMENTS (no, not Iodine, Ytterbium and Osmium) were the
 following:

WORD - Yes, jolly good, RR has that,

ATTRIBUTE RUN - Um,

PARAGRAPH - Um . . .

Now I am well aware RR is not a glorified text-editor (after all, one can
 download endless superior text-editors for free), however, it is not 
unreasonable to suppose that the ability to perform what is permitted
by AppleScript in TextEdit in text fields in Runtime Revolution would
be extremely useful: particularly because Runtime Revolution, unlike both
AppleScript and TextEdit are both tightly bound to one operating system.

I seem to use lots and lots of text fields containing sentences that contain differently coloured words, as well as using italicisation (well, I do develop for EFL); and being able to check certain aspects of those fields in terms of WHICH words, exactly, were coloured red, rather than green (for example) would be fantastic.

Looking at the SuperTalk Language Guide (just downloaded Trial 4.6.3 
for reference) I see:

spaceBefore  "set the spaceBefore of char 20 to 256 of bg field "notes" to 15"

and

spaceAfter

which, presumably, could be used to determine how many paragraphs a text 
field contained, as it could be used for indenting paragraphs.

sincerely, Richmond Mathewson

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A Thorn in the flesh is better than a failed Systems Development Life Cycle.
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