Because technical writing, and especially source-code, has a limited,
much repeated repetoire of words, the following simple utility would
be very useful, IMO ?
It seems to need only 3 operations, to allow the user to build his text
from an evolving [during the session/or predefined] pallet of strings.
1. push strings to a menu;
2. show/select from menu to;
3. copy the selection to the current caret position.
1. Push text-string to PopUpMenu
* Select the text-string, which may be visible anywhere on screen;
* Activate 'Copy'; possibly associated with sub-menu which has
first been navigated to.
2. Show menu[s] selection
* this facility exists immediately with V4 & System-3 already
3. Copy menu-selection to current caret position.
--------
V4 which I've only just installed has the facility to 'pick a font/colour'
to be copied to the current selection. Which nearly achieves steps 2 & 3
above.
S-3 has a well explained popup-menu system which I could try to use.
But since I've always criticised the continual recreation of similar
routines, where they already exist in the system[s], I wanted to
copy/modify the existing code of V4 -- which I have only as
running under linux.
Now, a way to find where the source-code is, that has written
something to the screen eg. "dark red"; which the [Font] button
of a menuFrame of V4 does, is as a last resort, to search all *.Obj
for the string "dark red". Because text-strings appear in the
object-code as the same text-strings which are displayed
-- normally ?
I've been doing this for years with S 3; but V4 finds no "dark red".
<BWT I've been reading recently how different societies/cultures
classify different colo[u]rs, but I didn't know that germans call
brown, dark-red ?!>
A job where I want to use this utility now is for copying while
I analyse some explanation/formulars from a book, where I
use different colour/font for where the book does too.
So eg. I'd select the 'bold-blue' "C" or the 'italic-red' "C"
according to as the book uses bold-C or italic-C ..etc.
Q1. how should I find the source-code which writes "dark red"
in the popUp of the menu-frame ?
Q2. what other similar build-your-strings-for-later-use utilities
already exist ?
I've already copied all of *.Mod from the linux/V4 directory-tree
to a single directory tree to search for "dark red" with linux's mc,
but this apparently uses a 'line at a time' searcher [? grep], which
is problematic since V4 lacks the linux line-terminators.
Linux could do it if I knew how to ask for:
search the current dir-tree,
for all files of *.Mod,
containing "dark red",
where the files FIRST translate Char(13) to Char(10)
Thanks for any feedback,
== Chris Glur.
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