Welcome to the technical documentation for Free Text, short form! To get the full story of Free Text, you really have to read my C code and comments thereto. This technical information contains excerpts from the documentation/comments of the Free Text external functions (XFCNs). It may be of particular interest to those who would like to customize Free Text or who want to take advantage of its XFCNs for use in other stacks.
If you want to work on Free Text and improve it at the HyperTalk scripting level, begin by looking at all the scripts and the names and contents of the various invisible fields. Those fields correspond directly to the XFCN parameters (discussed below) which control how information is retrieved from a database. Thus, if you want to change the amount of text fetched in a single chunk, you simply need to put a new value into the parameter textChunkSize. If you want to make the Index View windows show a different number of lines, change the contents of indexLines. To change the threshhold for skipping lines in the Context View of a subset, or to change the maximum sample number of words counted in an index subset before switching to a percentage estimate, alter the values in maxContextLinesSkipped or maxIndexSampleCount respectively.
