Not many people know this.

[Ben Rubinstein]

Sorry, did somebody just give me an excuse to indulge in nostalgia?

On 16/08/2018 18:48, Richard Gaskin via use-livecode wrote:
> AFAIK all xTalks have supported styled text.  It may be that HC 1.0 only 
> provided that for the whole field (I can't recall),

It was definitely the case that HC 1.0 only supported one style per field; and 
I know this is so because when the Design Museum opened in London in 1989, it 
featured an interactive guide to its permanent collection on half-a-dozen Mac SEs.

We made the collection guide in HyperCard, and it featured hyperlinks which we 
wanted to be in bold:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/rj6zuxo1u5l2bfn/DM01_tudyCollRichSapper.jpg

There was a simple CMS mode for editing the text and defining links; when the 
user saved changes, it invoked a layout mode which wrapped the text around an 
image (i.e. we had two fields and split the text between them) and also made 
the links. But there was no facility for bold text; and none of the functions 
which can now be used to figure out where on the card a character in a field 
has been drawn existed then.

The solution we adopted, which could _possibly_ be described as overkill, was 
to use an XCMD we'd already made which could grab a screenshot and store it in 
the stack as an icon resource; and add a new one which could compare two 
icons. So when the code wanted to make a word bold, it made its best guess as 
to where the word that was to be linked would be on the card; took a 
screenshot centered on that position; then created a small field with the word 
(that would also act as a button for the link); and placed it at that 
location. Then it could take another screenshot and compare it to the base one 
without the link field: if the location was just right, the two would be the 
same, and it just needed to nudge the field one pixel to the right to make it 
a bold hyperlink. If the two were different, it moved the field in a spiral 
around the point, one pixel at a time, and taking another screenshot each 
step, until it finally found the correct spot. If after moving the field some 
hundreds of times it was unable to locate the perfect point, it played a sound 
sample "Please help by moving the word" and made the field track the mouse 
until the user clicked to indicate it was just right.

It is arguable whether the time spent creating this solution to make the 
layout process nearly automatic was actually less than the time saved by not 
requiring a more manual process. But I felt it was a triumph all the same!

I'm going to ask Nurse to bring my nightcap now.

Ben