slf@mel.dit.csiro.au (Stewart Forster) (01/03/91)
Hi, I am writing an application in Xt that requires the use of specially formatted textual output. I am posting this for suggestions. The format consists of many lines of text, each line consists of two independant strings which both may be of arbitrary length. Now I want to be able to edit strings in this format plus have the ability to allow a horizontal scrollbar for use by the user, in the case of window overflow. I have tried hacking around with the Athena Text widget but it does not provide the sort of formatting control I reuquire. I thought of using list widgets but I am uncertain as to how these would handle editing, as well as scrolling. Can somebody please suggest a possible solution using the current Athena widget set, or am I doomed to study the intricacies of creating my own widget. Thank you in advance, Stewart Forster.
swick@athena.mit.EDU (Ralph Swick) (01/03/91)
The format consists of many lines of text, each line consists of two independant strings which both may be of arbitrary length. ... I have tried hacking around with the Athena Text widget but it does not provide the sort of formatting control I reuquire. You might take a look at the interfaces for TextSource (TextSrc) and TextSink. If you want to maintain the pairs of strings as independently addressable entities, a specialized TextSource should be able to do what you want. If you want special display formatting, a specialized TextSink might do the trick. There's an example of a *very* specialized alternative text source in clients/xmh/tsource*. Unfortunately, there's not a lot of written documentation on these interfaces; use the R4 Xaw manual and the code. No guarantees that any of this is easier than writing your own editing widget from scratch. :-)