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From: man@cs.brown.edu (Mark H. Nodine)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.hypercard
Subject: Re: Hypertalk questions for gurus...
Message-ID: <63627@brunix.UUCP>
Date: 4 Feb 91 19:45:46 GMT
References: <9101292006.aa01354@BONNIE.ICS.UCI.EDU> <48786@apple.Apple.COM>
Sender: news@brunix.UUCP
Reply-To: man@cs.brown.edu (Mark H. Nodine)
Organization: Brown Computer Science Dept.
Lines: 32

In article <48786@apple.Apple.COM>, jdevoto@Apple.COM (Jeanne A. E. DeVoto) writes:
|> In article <9101292006.aa01354@BONNIE.ICS.UCI.EDU>
|> rhutchin@BONNIE.ICS.UCI.EDU writes:
|> >   So I have a table of contents set up with "Chapter" names in one field.
|> >   When the user clicks on a line that has the name of the chapter, it
|> >   sets the visible of the appropriate field that contains the names of
|> >   "sections" in the chapter.  But I'd like to keep the chapter name hilighted
|> >   in when I write into other fields, so the user can see how they got where
|> >   they are. So here's what the problem boils down to:  How can I write text
|> >   into a field while NOT altering the selected text in another field?
|> 
|> Basically, you can't -- you can only have one selection at a time.
|> You have a couple of alternatives:
|> 
|> [two proposed solutions]

Another solution that I have used in the past is to ignore Hypercard's
highlighting ability and mark the selection by a different mechanism.
Specifically, what I did was to start each line with a space and use the
bullet character (option-8) in character 1 to indicate the selection.
So a selection looks something like

   set char 1 to 1 of line selLine to " "
   set char 1 to 1 of line newLine to "<bullet-character>"
   set selLine to newLine

The advantages of this are that
  (1) it is quick,
  (2) it works even in a scrolling field, and
  (3) the field maintains a permanent record of what is selected.

	--Mark