urban@spp2.UUCP (Michael Urban) (01/21/88)
In my Esperanto Course stack (available on CIS and submitted for comp.binaries.mac; can someone send me email with suggestions for further dissemination?), I have several cases in which the student must type text into a field, which is "then" processed by the card in some way. The problem is, how can I recognize that processing is to begin? My current solution is that the user must "hit ENTER twice"; the first Enter "closes" the field (finishes type-in) and the second one then can be caught by the card to begin processing. This is annoying (except on old keyboards, where Enter is fairly convenient). Providing a button to perform the operation (as in the HyperMacinTalk stack) may be slightly better, but requires hand movement off the keyboard, which is annoying in some cases in which several such type-ins take place consecutively. The best solution would be to catch a single RETURN, but (although these fields are only one line), HyperCard evidently doesn't provide any event when such a key event occurs; it is part of the text field processing. Have I missed something important? Is there an easy way to do this? A hard, but well-known way? By the way, I got bitten MANY times in this stack by HyperCard's idiosyncratic idea of where to break lines (between a parenthesis and the following word???). Maybe text fields should have a "break on white space only" option that you can select; this would maintain backward compatibility while allowing fields that "do the right thing". Hrumph! -- Mike Urban ...!trwrb!trwspp!spp2!urban "You're in a maze of twisty UUCP connections, all alike"