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From: minow@mountn.dec.com (Martin Minow)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: TextEdit as a paragraph engine
Message-ID: <583@mountn.dec.com>
Date: 11 Aug 89 20:21:27 GMT
References: <28299@watmath.waterloo.edu>
Reply-To: minow@mountn.UUCP (Martin Minow)
Distribution: na
Organization: Digital Equipment Corporation
Lines: 31

In article <28299@watmath.waterloo.edu> gjditchfield@watmsg.waterloo.edu
(Glen Ditchfield) writes:
>
>I've heard suggestions that, if plain TextEdit is too simple for your
>editing needs, then somewhat fancier editors can be built by using TextEdit
>as a "paragraph engine".

TextEdit has a number of internal values stored as signed 16-bit integers.
This limits it to 32K bytes of data and (because there are pixel positions
also stored in 16-bit Points) about 2000 lines (32K / 16 pixel/line).
(This is explained in a recent Inside Mac).  There is also a limit to
the length of a line due to the 16-bit limit.

If you are willing to position paragraphs on the screen, and do a lot
of the scrolling effort yourself, and not allow text selections  to extend
beyond one paragraph, you could "probably" create a separate TextEdit
record for each paragraph of your data.  It's a lot of work, though.

You could even create a TextEdit record for the window, adding and
removing chunks of text from the edit record as lines scroll in
and out of the screen.  Of course, with huge screens and tiny fonts,
you may still exceed TextEdit's limitations.

I've written a TextEdit replacement (coming to MacTutor in the near
future) that doesn't have this limitation.  (It doesn't do styles
or ScriptManager stuff either.)  It took me about a month of evenings
to get it working.  (No, I won't post it to the net before the MacTutor
article is published.)

Martin Minow
minow%thundr.dec@decwrl.dec.com