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Text: a rant


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[font:Arial Black]Probably I'm an idiot... [/font]

but Why?

[font:Times New Roman]Is it easier to format text[/font]

on the

Techboard

than it is

[font:Times New Roman]to format it in Vectorworks? [/font]

And it the [font:Arial Black] Techboard [/font]isn't even WYSIWYG.!!!!!!!!!!!!

Edited by brudgers
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I have.

Mtext has been around since R14...and worked smoothly on just about any hardware since acad2000.

It provides a WYSWYG interface.

I'll take it over format text any day...as a matter of fact, you can use it to dxf in formatted text to Vectorworks.

I did it today as a matter of fact.

Edited by brudgers
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And .. to prove that we all are not alone ...

let's try a little group confidence builder:

" I want all of you to stand up and step away from your desk ... make sure that

you are at least an arms length away ... and... that there's an unobstructed area

right behind you.

Standing erect ... now close your eyes ... let your body fall backwards...

let go of your fears ... see ... then .. you are not alone after all... ; ) "

WYSIWYG

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Should I copyright the "look and feel?"

There were a number of features added at release 14 which taxed most hardware. Mtext was one, edit xref's in place was another.

But that was back in 1995.

But Vectorworks text doesn't even allow for an equivalent to the old "%%U" type inline formatting.

What's really frustrating though is that you can edit text attributes after creation, but not inline.

I wonder if "format text" qualifies under cash for clunkers.

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As I suspected, I am an idiot.

Though perhaps, I guess, I should have guessed that based on the behaviour of tools when executing menu commands...

...but it never occured to me that you would have to click to switch focus back to the text.

I suppose I'm just used to having options take effect immediately and their selection not create a context switch within application flow.

After digging through the vectorscript documentation and finding no way to modify text formatting I suspect that Vectorworks is internally encoding text in some legacy "Mac" way MacWrite aka - storing plain text in one place and then storing all it's formatting as a separate resource (as opposed to using inline tagging of text).

This would explain why vectorworks doesn't export text with formatting (other than by "printing" it via pdf).

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After digging through the vectorscript documentation and finding no way to modify text formatting I suspect that Vectorworks is internally encoding text in some legacy "Mac" way

Dear me. I suspect it is done in ?Microsoft? way. You know: the Word of your God, Gates, is stored with even changes to the Holy Scripture as a ?separate resource?.

Since you so deeply dislike the object-verb -syntax of all modern operating systems, maybe you should try and find a DOS-based CAD-program.

Or write your own: that's what Chairman Diehl did in 1985 or thereabouts. Easy.

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After digging through the vectorscript documentation and finding no way to modify text formatting

Which manual are you looking in? Text formatting has been included for a while now. You can either define the format before or after the text is created.

PROCEDURE SetTextFont(objectHd :HANDLE; Start :INTEGER; Count :INTEGER; FontNum :INTEGER);

PROCEDURE SetTextSize(objectHd :HANDLE; Start :INTEGER; Count :INTEGER; Size :REAL);

PROCEDURE SetTextStyle(objectHd :HANDLE; Start :INTEGER; Count :INTEGER; Style :INTEGER);

With the advent of object oriented programming, all objects have attributes (formatting) and actions encapsulated in the definition of the object. In this case, each character in a text string is an object. C++ and Java, which are currently the most used to develop programs, are OOP languages and OS independent.

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With the advent of object oriented programming, all objects have attributes (formatting) and actions encapsulated in the definition of the object. In this case, each character in a text string is an object. C++ and Java, which are currently the most used to develop programs, are OOP languages and OS independent.

I think you're wrapping the relevent technologies the wrong way.

It looks like the Vectorworks text object is object.oriented.minicadcallbacks.cupertino.scripture.circa1984

For at least the past 40 years, it has been recognized that text should use self described formatting. That's why markup languages are ubiquitous.

The limitations of the Vectorworks approach are obvious.

Just try to store formatting in a general note...or pasting formatted text from another application (at least under windows).

Edited by brudgers
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I think you're wrapping the relevent technologies the wrong way.

It looks like the Vectorworks text object is object.oriented.minicadcallbacks.cupertino.scripture.circa1984

For at least the past 40 years, it has been recognized that text should use self described formatting. That's why markup languages are ubiquitous.

You seem to be confusing program look and feel with underlying implementation.

'For at least the past 40 years' it has been recognised that the program at the user level should be abstract from the underlying technologies at many levels. Just because something is input in a particular way, it doesn't mean that it should be stored or processed in a particular way. The use of markup and an attribute/properties (not to be confused with a true object orientated approach such as provided by object orientated languages or operating systems) based characters can be quite happily interchanged and should have no bearing on what the underlying operating system or programming language offer.

As technology has evolved, this abstraction has become easier and unfortunately in some cases become confused and abused. Take HTML and XHTML as two widely understood text languages. They are both quite different, one being markup and the other being based on an attribute based language, yet both very similar and both are equally at home being processed in a markup based approach or an object orientated/attribute way. But the end result is identical as far as the user (web user) is concerned, which is hardly surprising it is abstract from the underlying technology even though the underlying technology is identical - text albeit interpreted in quite different, yet highly similar, ways.

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OK, Miguel, assuming that you're not being facecious, how do you format while typing?

Even tough my reply was not about this but vectorscript, Ian already answer that question in his attached JPG. You can use the object info palette to change the formatting of characters as you type them. This would be faster than typing formatting codes that you need to memorize.

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Even tough my reply was not about this but vectorscript, Ian already answer that question in his attached JPG. You can use the object info palette to change the formatting of characters as you type them. This would be faster than typing formatting codes that you need to memorize.

Actually I used the text menu which can of course be triggered by keystrokes - alt-xs9 etc.
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Even tough my reply was not about this but vectorscript, Ian already answer that question in his attached JPG. You can use the object info palette to change the formatting of characters as you type them. This would be faster than typing formatting codes that you need to memorize.

Perhaps to some extent it depends on your keyboard skills.

On the other hand, you'ld have to be the kind of person who pecks at the keyboard not to agree that ctrl-b is a faster way to bold text while you type than anything that requires a mouse.

Edited by brudgers
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Ian, The "ML" in both HTML and XHTML stands for "markup language." In XML, likewise.

As I say, people, like yourself have become confused. Yes, the ML does stand for markup language, but it stands for the markup of the language rather than the content. Most electronic documents contain markup in some form, yet you don't see Word for example being called WordML because it has markup.

As with many cases, you have obviously picked up on to one particular aspect without understanding the detail. My example of the difference between HTML and XHTML and you not seeing the differences yet latching on to some completely unrelated aspect is evidence that you do not understand what you are going on about.

Yes. HTML and XHTML are based on markup, but that is where the similarity ends. In HTML, the markup describes the content, ie text, which is exactly the type of markup that you are talking about. However, in XHTML, the markup does not describe the text, it describes the structure of the document. This is a subtle yet very fundamental and important difference and allows the content to be abstract from the implementation.

With HTML, a piece of markup is a trigger to the content. There needs to be no structure to it. With XHTML, the 'markup' is a property of the structure of the document, or more precisely, the lower levels of the document. It thus becomes an attribute to that section of the document and that section alone. Or in an object orientated world, it becomes an attribute (for the sake of confusion, not the same as an attribute in the language XML) to that instance of the document.

Thus..

in HTML, the markup controls the text

in XHTML, the text is controlled by the structure of the document, rather than any markup.

Taking it one step further to reiterate your tenuous understanding of the subject...

in XHTML, you may describe the XHTML document by means of a text representation, where by the structure is indeed defined by the markup in the text. However, you can then store the document, for instance in a b-tree (a binary tree, whereby objects have properties/attributes and may have child objects) which keeps the structure intact, yet all the markup has gone.

The text is still perfectly correct and the web page can be rebuilt solely from the structure of the document and not any markup, yet with HTML, the text would still require the markup as it is part of the text rather than the document structure.

Thus, with XHTML, the text and the markup are abstract, it is the properties/attributes of the document structure that control the representation of the page. Where as with HTML, it is not, it is the markup that controls the page layout. To the uninitiated, when viewing the source of a web page, the differences are very subtle if not totally transparent but when looked at in more detail, it is actually actually very fundamentally different.

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I see that you still not knowing what you are talking about.

Which part of "[ML] stands for the markup of the language rather than the content" don't you understand ?

I don't have to read Dr. Lee's website. I was an XML SME for the worlds largest bank about 8 years ago and specialised in the design, implementation and testing of high performance real time 64 bit, multi threaded, XML based (along with many other technologies) financial systems. I think I know what I am talking about and understand the subtleties and differences of what is a markup language and what is markup content that you clearly cannot grasp.

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