FAIRLY ADEQUATE TEXT EDITOR version 5.5, June 1989
ALL ABOUT THIS WONDERFUL CREATION
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This Text Editor contains most of the features you are likely to want for editing and creating text files from within HyperCard.
To install it in any stack, just pull down the Eyeball menu and choose COPY ME INTO A STACK. A dialogue box will let you choose the destination stack. All resources used by the Text Editor will automatically be installed in that stack, and the Text Editor itself will be installed as the last card of the stack. If you then wish to locate it elsewhere in the stack, you can do so with standard HyperCard menu items.
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The basic features of the editor are its menubar, the Editing Window, and three buttons near the bottom of the screen. The Editing Window is where text is stored, created, and manipulated. The menubar contains editing and other commands. The three buttons will be discussed momentarily. First, the menus.
E Y E B A L L:
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Located where you normally see the Apple Menu. Its menu options give info about the editor, and carry out several non-editing operations.
•ABOUT... brings up an About box.
•INSTRUCTIONS produces the window you are now reading.
•CREDITS shows credits for various resources used in this text editor.
•COPY ME INTO A STACK copies this card, together with all of its resources, into any stack of your choice. NOTE: The installed resources may not be active until you quit HyperCard and reopen that stack.
•INSTALL MY BUTTON installs a button, leading back to the text editor, on any card you choose in the local stack. Many stacks have a "home base" card from which most operations are carried out. That's normally the place to locate your text editor button. The button will appear near the lower righthand corner of the card. It has a Quill Pen icon.
•LINK ARROWS TO BUTTON CARD modifies the operation of the two navigation arrows. Instead of going to next or previous card, either of them will return you directly to the card with the text editor button.
•UNLINK ARROWS restores the normal function of the navigation arrows.
•EXPORT MY BUTTON installs a button, leading back to this stack, into any stack of your choice. This provides an alternative to installing the Editor in that stack. You have the option of choosing the card in the target stack that is to receive the button. You may export a button into as many stacks as you like. They will all work. When you Export My Button, a rectangular button will appear on the Editor Card, resembling the standard Go Away box, just to the left of the window label. It's a Go Back button. When you come to this stack via an Exported Button in another stack, the Go Back button will return you to that stack.
F I L E:
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Contains nine menu options, as follows:
•EDIT FILE: allows you to open any disk file of type TEXT, and import it into the editing window. If it is larger than 30K, you will only import the first 30K of it (to be precise: 29990 bytes), since that is all a Hypercard window can hold. NOTE THE FOLLOWING POINT WELL: None of the editing operations you perform here will affect the original disk file: you are working on an internal copy of that file, NOT the file itself. However, when you SAVE your work, you have the option of overwriting existing files, which will destroy the old data. Make sure that’s what you want to do before doing it.
•SAVE will save the contents of the active window into the file from which the contents of that window were obtained, overwriting the previous contents of that file. It is similar to SAVE in MacWrite and other applications. This menu option is deactivated when there is no relevant file to save to, or after the window has been Cleared using the Edit menu option.
•SAVE AS... will save the contents of the active window into a TEXT file on disk. If you choose a file that already exists, that file will be overwritten by the current material. If you give a new file name, a new file will be created instead.
•PRINT sends the contents of the active window to the printer (Imagewriter or Laserwriter), after first showing the Print Job dialog box. Use it to print out these instructions, too.
•QUICKPRINT sends the currently visible window to the printer without showing dialog boxes; it uses the settings that already exist.
•PAGE SETUP brings up the Page Setup dialog box, allowing you to change those settings before printing.
•APPEND FILE TO WINDOW will append an external file to the bottom of what is already in the active window--handy for bringing in several related files.
•SPLICE FILES will splice together separate TEXT files into one large file. If the spliced files are to be imported into the Editing Window, their combined size can't exceed 30K. If they are to be combined into a disk file, combined size is limited only by available disk space.
•SPLIT A FILE will take a TEXT file—of any size—and split it up into separate smaller files of 16K each, that being the capacity of the Hypercard file reading buffer. If the original large file was named FILENAME, the smaller files will be named FILENAME.1, FILENAME.2, and so on.
E D I T:
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In addition to the standard Copy, Cut, and Paste options, this menu also includes
•CLEAR WINDOW, which does just that: it clears the active window, permanently deleting all contained text. If you click it accidentally, you get a warning before anything happens. Once erased, the text cannot be recovered. NOTE: Don't try to use the Cut, Copy, and Paste options as menu items; they won't work. Use their keyboard equivalents instead.
F O N T:
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Allows you to determine the font for the Editing Window.
S T Y L E:
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Is a standard style menu, allowing you to choose type sizes and styles and page alignments. Type styles, except "Plain", may be freely mixed, e.g. Bold Italic Underline. Type sizes are limited to those actually available for the chosen font. The currently active size appears Outlined.
S T A N D A R D S:
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Lists eleven of the most common or useful file modification commands.
•STRIP RETURNS replaces all carriage returns (<cr> characters) with a character of your choosing.
"Space" is the most common choice. If you select (hilight) a portion of text in the window, it will strip only the selection. Otherwise it will treat everything in the window, including text scrolled out of sight.
•STRIP SPACE RUNS allows you to replace all runs of 2 or more spaces with a character string of your choosing, either in a selected portion or in the entire window. NOTE: to enter a tab, a carriage-return, or a null character as the replacement string, type in the word "tab", "return", or "none". You will be asked whether the word, or the character it denotes, is to be the replacement string.
•INSTALL SMART DOUBLE QUOTES changes "dumb" double-quotes to "smart" double-quotes. Dumb quotes are paired apostrophes, like this " " ; smart quotes are curved, like this: “”.
•INSTALL DUMB DOUBLE QUOTES performs the reverse conversion. Used mainly to prep a file for export to a non-Macintosh computer as an "ASCII" file.
•INSTALL SMART SINGLE QUOTES and
•INSTALL DUMB SINGLE QUOTES work similarly.
•TAB-->CHAR lets you convert a tab-delimited files into a comma-delimited file; more generally, it allows you to replace tab characters with any other character or string of characters.
•CHAR-->TAB performs the reverse conversion.
•REPLACE...is a general find-and-replace commnd. You will be queried for the string to be replaced, and for the string to replace it with. For the sake of speed, this relies on the Hypercard find algorithms, so it cannot be restricted to a selected portion of the text, but will make the change in the entire Editing Window, including material scrolled out of sight.
•FAKETAB takes a comma-delimited file and converts it into a "fake-tabbed" file, whose fields are padded out with spaces to resemble tabbing. When displayed in a monospace font such as Monaco or Courier, a fake-tabbed file looks just like a tab-delimited one. FAKETAB is most useful for setting up files to be displayed in HyperCard fields, which do not recognize tabs. To convert a tab-delimited file into a fake-tabbed one, first convert it into a comma-delimited file with TAB-->CHAR, then convert the result with FAKETAB.
•SET RIGHT EDGE inserts carriage returns to assure that no line is longer than the length you set. It is useful for preparing textfiles for uploading to info services or BBS's that require text to be under a
certain minimum line length. NOTE: This menu option does NOT relocate any existing returns; it only inserts new ones. Run it twice on the same text (e.g. to make the lines shorter) and you will get wierd results. To make it work right a second time, first do STRIP RETURNS.
To the right of the Menus, a message panel keeps you informed of the amount of text currently present in the active window. Next to that, a telephone button allows you to use the Text Editor as an auto-dialer. Simply load your phone number list into one of the windows, select a number, and click the phone button to have the Mac dial that number. At the far right, the balloon button brings up the screen you are now reading.
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At the bottom of the screen the SWITCH MENUS button allows you to toggle between the Text Editor menu bar and the regular HyperCard menu bar. Its keyboard equivalent is Command-spacebar.
The SWITCH WINDOWS button allows you to toggle between the regular Editing Window and an Auxiliary Window, just like the Editing Window. Use it in case you want to clip out a portion from the Main window, do a find & replace on it, and paste it back into the Main window. Or for any other editing purpose. The Auxiliary Window works exactly the same way as the Editing Window. Also the editing menu choices (all of them) apply only to the currently active window.
The STACKSIZE button displays the size of the current stack, in Kilobytes, and indicates how much of it is
"wasted space". When the Waste figure gets too high, a click on the box will compact the stack for you, eliminating the wasted space.
Left and Right navigation arrows initially perform their usual HyperCard duty. But see instructions for Eyeball Menu above.
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MOVING BUTTONS AROUND: Info for the Non-Expert
Two of the Eyeball Menu options allow you to install and export text editor buttons. But these buttons may not be exactly where you want them. To move a button from one place to another on the same card, first select the Button Tool (center item, top) from the Tools menu in the HyperCard menubar. Click on the button to select it, and when its dotted outline begins to move, drag it to the desired location. Then re-select the Browse Tool (pointing finger) from the Tools menu, and you're ready to go.
To move a button from one card to another, select it with the Button Tool and then choose Cut Button from the Edit menu (or type Command-X). Go to the desired card and choose Paste Button (or type Command-V); then drag the button to the desired location and re-select the Browse Tool.
You can also choose the Button Tool without using the menubar, by holding down the Command key and hitting the Tab key twice. Command-Tab will return you to the Browse Tool.
If there is no Tools menu, or if there is one but you cannot select the Button Tool, your userlevel is set too low. Type SET USERLEVEL TO 5 in the message box and hit the return key, to reset it. If the message box is not visible, Command-M will bring it up. (This is general advice, for all stacks. If this card is installed in a stack, you can just use the menu command under the Eyeball to change userlevels.)
All comments, suggestions, criticisms, effusive praise, etc. are encouraged, and will be carefully evaluated by The Management. Permission is hereby granted to use this stack any way you like, so long as the info, copyright notices, etc. are kept intact.
