ech@spuxll.UUCP (Ned Horvath) (01/12/85)
<lunch> This discussion started in fa.info-mac; I presume the appropriate gateways will carry it back to arpaland... Most Mac applications do their text entry through the Text Edit (TE) toolbox routines -- there is very little motivation to roll your own, since the TE stuff is very easy to interface to, and (as with most of the toolbox packaages) the programmer can filter what goes to the TE package. The alternative is to bite off a lot of the headaches TE handles so nicely (left/right/center justification, optional wordwrap, memory management, mouse sensing, window updates etc.) and do your own text drawing directly with Quickdraw (QD). Unfortunately, TE (and indeed the QD text routines) have a strong left-to-right bias: the DrawChar routine takes the current pen position as the left end of the baseline, and moves the pen to the right end of the baseline after drawing the text. It may be that a fairly simple left/right swap in ALL the appropriate places would do the trick, but a LOT of (ROM resident!) routines are going to be affected. My guess would be that even Macs designated for sale in Tel Aviv will probably NOT have such modifications. The other possibility is that this could be worked into the non-volatile RAM as a control-panel option to affect QD, TE, and whatever else cares. Whether Apple would consider it worth their while is another question... =Ned=