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From: neves@aristotle.ils.nwu.edu (David Neves)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.hypercard
Subject: Making areas of field text clickable?
Message-ID: <3811@accuvax.nwu.edu>
Date: 13 Feb 90 20:48:03 GMT
Sender: news@accuvax.nwu.edu
Reply-To: neves@aristotle.ils.nwu.edu (David Neves)
Organization: The Institute for the Learning Sciences, Northwestern University
Lines: 34


Here is my problem.

I have many field texts.  I want to make most of the text in these
fields sensitive to clicks.  The 2 ways of doing this are:

1.  Have the field (on mousedown or mouseup) figure out what text the user has
clicked on.  This gets messy because the only RETURNs in the fields
are between paragraphs and the font is variable width.  To do this one
would have to write an XCMD that used the character width information
and a good guess as to the word wrap routine that Hypercard (in my
case, Supercard) was using.  

2.  Put buttons over all the text.  I don't want to do this by hand
because I might change the field width or the text font.  Both of
these would affect the positioning of words and so the buttons would
not longer be under the correct words.  

It is not trival to get a program to do this automatically.  The only
way that I could think of doing this is to start at the left part of
the field and gradually (pixel by pixel) select larger chunks of text
by using DRAG or CLICK.  Because the program is doing the dragging you
know the left and right pixel positions of the selected text
underneath.

Before we write this sad kludge I wonder if anyone else has run into
problem or see an obviously easier way of doing it.

p.s.
For those using Supercard there is a nasty bug in SEND.  You can only
SEND to cards that are being displayed in a window, not to cards that
are not at the front.
neves@ils.nwu.edu
Institute for the Learning Sciences, 1890 Maple, Evanston Il 60201