WASTE 1.3 Documentation

WASTE DOCUMENTATION Written by: Marco Piovanelli (<mailto:marco.piovanelli@pobox.com>) Version: 1.3, January 1998 Copyright © 1993-1998 Marco Piovanelli This document describes WASTE, a WorldScript™-Aware Styled Text Engine for the Macintosh which can be used as the basis for simple to moderately complex applications dealing with styled text. WASTE has been designed from the very beginning to be compatible with TextEdit and TextEdit- based applications, although not everything you can do with TextEdit can be done with WASTE and vice versa. The main features of WASTE are: • Memory-based editor, with no limit imposed on text size. • Requires System 7.0 or newer. • WorldScript™-aware. • Built-in undo routines. • Built-in support for drag-and-drop text editing. • Built-in support for inline input. • A mechanism for embedding pictures, sounds and other “objects” in the text. • Low-level hooks for customizing text drawing and measuring. • Allows full justification of text. • Uses offscreen graphics worlds to achieve smooth text redrawing. • Supports command-clicking of URLs via Internet Config. This document assumes that you are familiar with the TextEdit model and with text handling on the Macintosh in general, including the Script Manager and the Text Services Manager. The best introduction to the subject of text handling on the Macintosh platform is the book “Inside Macintosh: Text”. WASTE Documentation 1 A Brief Overview of WASTE This section gives you a general overview of WASTE and of what it can do for your application. Since WASTE is so similar to TextEdit, a special emphasis is given to those areas in which the two models diverge. WASTE Data Structures WASTE header files contain very few type declarations, since all internal data structures are private and cannot be accessed directly. There is no type declaration for the internal format of a WE instance, the WASTE counterpart to a TextEdit edit record. Instead you refer to a WE instance via an opaque reference. This allows future versions of WASTE to add new functionality and new data structures painlessly, without breaking existing applications. You should make no assumptions as to how style and line-layout information is represented internally, but you can count on the text being stored as a single relocatable block, to which you can obtain a handle. This maximizes compatibility with existing TextEdit-based applications which rely heavily on this assumption. Long Coordinates To allow for text taller than 32,767 pixels (a serious limitation of the TextEdit model), WASTE uses long (32-bit) coordinates to identify positions within the destination rectangle. This should not constitute a problem for your application, but be careful if you use a vertical scroll bar! WASTE comes with an extens…