bhyde@inmet.UUCP (10/07/85)
It is a very interesting issue how to allow a document,that like those of MacWrite, have more structure than a flat linear stream. For example Microsoft's Word allows the paragraphs to by attributed with formatting info, so it admits to characters/words/sentences/paragraphs as entities within the linear stream of your document. To allow for multi-paragraph clusters would require some way to visually show them. That shouldn't be too hard except that deep nesting and huge regions would conspire to make the whole think seem confusing. There is very little attempt to allow clustering in the Mac software I'm aware of. The grouping construct in MacDraw is one of the few. The finder's folders are another. If you want to push a formating context in MacWrite a marginally good cliche is to insert two rulers, and then modify the first, and finally insert your display. This is no help when you want to change all the text in the document to have a wider right margin but it is a step. Why can't you paste a ruler into the searching/changing dialog? ben hyde, cambridge.