Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!brunix!omh
From: omh@brunix (Owen M. Hartnett)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: TranSkel, TransEdit help...
Keywords: TransSkel, TransEdit
Message-ID: <14940@brunix.UUCP>
Date: 12 Sep 89 01:39:58 GMT
References: <6383@ingr.com>
Sender: news@brunix.UUCP
Reply-To: omh@zaphod.UUCP (Owen M. Hartnett)
Organization: Brown University Department of Computer Science
Lines: 34

In article <6383@ingr.com> henges@ingr.com (John Hengesbach) writes:
>1)  Why is there a hard coded limit of 32K for a file to be editted?  I
>    hvae seen this on DA's such as MockWrite (only its 28K there).  Is
>    this just a "lazier" way of not worrying about whether there will
>    be enough memory?  Shouldn't SetHandleSize() work for arbitrary
>    lengths of memory, with some method for checking is it worked
>    correctly?  Certainly it is possible to edit files (for instance)
>    that are greater than some arbitrary limit near this 32K boundary.
 The 32K limit is a limitation of TextEdit, Apple's text editing routines.
Think (Symantec) used to sell a variation of TextEdit called Capps' which
overcame the limit, but it's been discontinued (sob!).  Right now, the
only solution to overcome this is to write your own textediting routines
or patch Apple's.  Patching Apple's routines has been done by a few
people, but is not recommended, because every now and then they change
TextEdit and break your code.  (Unfortunately, they still can't overcome
the 32K barrier!  Also, they don't support tabs.  This would be one of
the first things I'd fix in System 7.0.  Really, when you think of the
Macintosh philosophy (the user should have control!) and then you look
at TE (the user is limited to a 32K file.  User: What does 32K mean?)
and it would be rather simple to put it right, at least as simple as
multitasking.)

>2)  On the same thread of thought, once memory is allocated for the
>    file in a text window, when/how does it get freed up again?
>

You can free it up with a TEDispose toolbox call.

-Owen

Owen Hartnett
Brown University Computer Science

omh@cs.brown.edu.CSNET