Richard, great insight as usual. I see that bothering with HTML was probably a totally unnecessary trip down the rabbit hole.
While I hide behind a rock (to deflect the shrapnel), who decided what the standard for style runs should be? Not Microsoft, I assume. Like there are some underlying conventions that are hidden from the public gaze... Arrays, forsooth. I suppose I'd better dust off my understanding of those blighters. Used to use them for purely numeric work (but that was when dinosaurs ruled the Earth). Graham > On 18 Feb 2015, at 19:08, Richard Gaskin <ambassa...@fourthworld.com> wrote: > > Graham Samuel wrote: > > > I just tried it and of course it works, but I can’t quite see > > what’s happening inside LC. I mean, I can select the field > > within my stack which has the formatted text in it, copy it > > and paste it into Word, and bingo! it looks the same. There > > is no obvious sign that Word thinks it was formatted in HTML. > > When text is rendered on screen (in LC, Word, or even a Web browser), it's a > binary structure of text and style runs. > > None of the formatting per se is in html/htmlText. Those are just plain-text > ways to *describe* formatting, but not the formatting itself. > > Any renderer, such as LiveCode or a browser, will need to interpret those > html/htmlText descriptions into text with style runs. > > HtmlText is simply an intermediary format generated from the binary style run > data when obtained from a field, and interpreted into binary style run data > when applied to a field. > > If this isn't confusing enough, take some time to experiment with the > relatively new styledText field property. It returns an array of the text > and style runs within a field object in a way that more closely reflects how > the engine handles these things under the hood. > > Not only will styledText give you a new appreciation for how programs render > styled text, but once you get the hang of working with it you'll find it's > often much faster for identifying and manipulating style info in field > contents than htmlText. > > For example, last week I needed to find runs of text in a field that had > linkText values. In htmlText the performance wasn't bad, but when I rewrote > that to use a styledText array it took only half as long. > > Getting close to the engine is rarely a bad thing. > > Know the engine. > Trust the engine. > Use the engine. > > -- > Richard Gaskin > Fourth World Systems > Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web > ____________________________________________________________________ > ambassa...@fourthworld.com http://www.FourthWorld.com > > _______________________________________________ > use-livecode mailing list > use-livecode@lists.runrev.com > Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription > preferences: > http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-livecode _______________________________________________ use-livecode mailing list use-livecode@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-livecode
