Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!helios.ee.lbl.gov!nosc!ucsd!rutgers!mit-eddie!uw-beaver!uw-june!moore
From: moore@june.cs.washington.edu (Charles Moore)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.hypercard
Subject: copying foregrounds and bug with long button names
Keywords: foreground, deletable, property, long names
Message-ID: <5694@june.cs.washington.edu>
Date: 10 Sep 88 22:38:57 GMT
Organization: U of Washington, Computer Science, Seattle
Lines: 55


     I have a  number of questions all relating to trying to easily copy a
card's foreground as well as background onto a new card.  The way to do
this, it would appear, is to use the "Copy Card" and "Paste Card" selections
from the Edit menu.  These, however, copy everything about the card
including all its properties and what I'll call the "deletable" property.
The "deletable" property of a card corresponds to whether or not the "Can't
delete card." box in the "Card Info..." dialog box is checked.  Now I want
to have an undeletable template of a card (both background and foreground)
and I want to make a deletable copy of it.  I want to do all of this from a
script.  The problem is that the "deletable" property isn't really a
property at all and so isn't alterable from within a script.

     This leaves me with one alternative: copying one by one each of the
foreground elements from my template card onto a new card that I've created
with the "New Card" menu item.  This makes for very slow scripts but I've
lived with that up until now. 

     I recently discovered a problem with referring to buttons with very
long names.  If I issue a command such as

click at location of button "Click here for more time and duration blanks."

a box comes up with the message, 

Never heard of card button named Click here for more time@card *

The @ and * symbols above are not actually what comes up but I can't produce
the actual symbols for a newsgroup posting.  In place of the @ symbol is a
square.  In place of the * symbol is a lower case 'o' with an accent "grave"
over it.

     Now this is clearly a bug since, even if the button has a name that's
too long to use in full in the dialog box, you shouldn't get garbage
characters at the end of the truncated button name.

     So now I'm stuck.  My questions are 

(1) Is there a way to copy the entire foreground of a card to another card
without simultaneously copying the state of the "deletable" property?

(2) If not, is there a way to change the "deletable" property from within a
script?  (It seems like there ought to be.)

(3) If not, is there a fix to the referring-to-long-named-buttons bug?  For
various reasons that I won't go into, referring to the button by it's i.d.
number or button number is not a solution. 

     I'm using Hypercard version 1.0.1 on a Macintosh SE with 1 megabyte of
memory.  I would appreciate any helpful suggestions that anybody can give
me.


Charles Moore
University of Washington
Seattle, Washington