twakeman@hpcea.CE.HP.COM (Teriann Wakeman) (02/17/88)
Help, i'm at script's end trying to figgure out how to emulate tabs in a scrollable field. in a fixed field, you can set several small fields side by side for nice neat columns. There are even some crafty people out there who have figured out how to put scrolled fields side by side and have them act like a single field. The drawback there, as far as i understand is that it is not very fast and becomes slower as more scrollable fields try to emulate one field with tabs. PROBLEM: I need a scrollable field with 5 columns. the leftmost is an alpha column and can contain up to 32 chars plus some space to the next column. The next is a short date, followed by two single digit columns. the lest most is a variable length string of digits. i can more or less make due with a fixed number of spaces between all but between the first and second columns. I have tried using the length of the first string and adding spaces after my string until a certian length is reached, and the offset of the first / in the date and adding spaces before the date. Unfortunatly, chars take up different amounts of space. I can manually line up columns, as close as a space bar will allow & have the length of the first column string be anywhere from 43 to 54. URG!! Also, repeat loops where the length is compaired to a number and a space added is -s l o w-. if only i could get the loc of the front end of a text string, if only Hypercard fields had real tabs, if only someone out there had and answer to my problem... HELP!!! TeriAnn Wakeman
ns@CAT.CMU.EDU (Nicholas Spies) (02/18/88)
Try using Monaco or another fixed-width font; then padded text will at least appear in regular columns. Also, don't forget the fixed-width option-space character (the width of a number)... If the tab and shift-tab field selection technique was fast then not supporting tabs might be justified. As it is, HyperCard has the main limitations and TE and few of its advantages. Another problem (fixed in 1.1?) is that double-s German character (and possibly others) are considered whitespace when double-clicking, so "grossen" selects either "gro" or "en" but not the whole word. Then of course there is the paricularly obnoxious problem of bogus word-wrap. How much simpler it would be if only ASCII $20 were considered whitespace... -- Nicholas Spies ns@cat.cmu.edu.arpa Center for Design of Educational Computing Carnegie Mellon University