Article Preview
Buy Now
| Print: | |
| PDF: |
Beginner's Corner
Text Styling
Working with styled text
Issue: 5.2 (January/February 2007)
Author: Marc Zeedar
editor-at-rbdeveloper.com
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 12,842
Starting Page Number: 34
RBD Number: 5212
Resource File(s):
5212.zip Updated: Monday, January 15, 2007 at 1:16 PM
Related Link(s): None
Known Limitations: None
Excerpt of article text...
For years REALbasic supported styled text in EditFields -- that is, text with various fonts, sizes, and other characteristics like bold and italic -- but there was no easy mechanism for you, the programmer, to access those details. Figuring out styled text was a complicated adventure of parsing the TextStyleData string within a memoryblock -- not for the faint of heart. That changed a few years ago when REALbasic introduced the StyledText class.
For those of you new to the whole concept of styled text, let's explore the medium for a minute. It will greatly help your understanding later.
Now plain text is easy -- it's just a string of characters:
The fast fox flounced across the flooded freeway.
With REALbasic's advanced string handling, you really don't even have to worry about text encoding, like whether some text is double-byte (i.e. Chinese, where each character is represented by a two-byte number). REALbasic's string handling routines handle all that stuff for you, so you just treat text as text and everything just works. (I'll still never get over my amazement when an early user of my Z-Write word processor, in 1999, sent me a screen shot of Z-Write working right-to-left with Hebrew text. I, of course, had done nothing extra to support Hebrew: it just worked.)
...End of Excerpt. Please purchase the magazine to read the full article.
Article copyrighted by REALbasic Developer magazine. All rights reserved.
|
