Getting text options

[Dieter @ DWorks]

This is the problem:

I have a pio. I let the pio use the standard text options that are set at the moment. The size is set with a parameter.

If you select a pio, you can select a text option and change it. This does not change the standard for this text option.

What I want to know is: How to retrieve a text option that is chosen when the pio was selected? Because now you need to select nothing, change the option, select the pio and make it regenerate. This is not good for a user.

So how program a pio so that when it's selected, it changes it's text to the text options chosen at the moment it was selected?

I hope i'm clear enough to make sense.

[Robert Anderson]

First, (assuming you're using VectorScript) you get a handle to the PIO using GetCustomObjectInfo(). Then you use an "object variable" to give this text-attribute-holding property to your PIO:

SetObjectVariableBoolean(My_PIO_Handle,800,TRUE);

Your PIO will obtain its text settings from the document settings when newly placed, and will keep them when regenerated even if the document settings change. You can also, as you have seen, select the PIO instance and reset the text settings.

[Dieter @ DWorks]

thx Robert.

So this variable is default false?

That's strange because I think that most people will expect this behavior.

I will try this out.

[Robert Anderson]

The variable needs to be "attached" to the object and set to TRUE. I've never seen it set to FALSE. This is just more a convention of it being a Boolean variable, i.e. a "flag".

[Petri]

To make life even more miserable in Belgium (if there still is one by the time DWorks reads this in the Kingdom/Republic of Flanders):

Four out of five users hate this approach. They want to freely choose the typeface, size & style (= font to us typographers), but expect that this font is then used in all instances at least in one file, but quite often in every file. Except the ones - instances or files - where they expect the Mind Reader plug-in to automatically intervene and keep the font. Or, better still, change it in a suitable way.

Notwithstanding, four out of five users love this approach, too...