IDE versus MSG Box - Field Tabstops

[Mike Bonner]

you get 100, 150, 200 absolute positioning. If you had set to 150,100,200
you'd get back 150, 250, 450.. All of which explains why I use absolutes to
keep my head from exploding.


On Wed, Aug 14, 2013 at 4:46 PM, Richard Gaskin
<ambassador at fourthworld.com>wrote:

> Geoff Canyon wrote:
>
>> On Wed, Aug 14, 2013 at 9:34 AM, Richard Gaskin wrote:
>>
>>> The tabstops property requires absolute metrics from the left edge of the
>>> control; that is, each item is the complete measure from that edge, e.g.:
>>>
>>> 100,150,225
>>>
>>
>> I've never found this to be the case. I just opened up LC 5.0, created a
>> field with text and tabs in it, and in the message box typed:
>>
>>   set the tabstops of fld 1 to 200,100,150,75
>>
>> No crash, and the text formatted the way I expected. Now if I type in the
>> message box:
>>
>>   put the tabstops of fld 1
>>
>> I get:
>>
>>   200,300,450,525
>>
>> Which is exactly what I expected; the first value was taken literally, and
>> the rest were incremental. For kicks, I tried:
>>
>>   set the tabstops of fld 1 to 200,100,250,675
>>
>> and then
>>
>>   put the tabstops of fld 1
>>
>> gets me:
>>
>>   200,300,550,675
>>
>> Which means that the first value was absolute, the next two relative even
>> though the third was larger than either of the first two (but not larger
>> than their sum), and the last, which was larger than the sum of the three
>> previous, was again absolute.
>>
>
> You really expected the value coming back to be different from what you
> set it to?
>
> If you set the text of a field to "Hello", do you expect getting the text
> from the field to yield "World"? ;)
>
> It seems the engine is being very graceful in allowing both relative and
> absolute values as input for the tabStops, but ultimately the values that
> get stored are the absolute ones.
>
> If that weren't the case it would mean that Mark Waddingham wasted his
> time adding the tabWidth property, and I don't think I've ever seen Mark
> willfully waste his time.
>
> Now I'm wondering what the engine does with values in which each column is
> larger than the last.  That is, if you set the tabstops to this:
>
> 100,150,200
>
> ...do you get this back:
>
> 100,250,450
>
> ..or:
>
> 100,150,200
>
> ?
>
> --
>  Richard Gaskin
>  Fourth World
>  LiveCode training and consulting: http://www.fourthworld.com
>  Webzine for LiveCode developers: http://www.LiveCodeJournal.com
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>
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