Legacy Document

Inside Macintosh: Interapplication Communication /

Chapter 2 - Edition Manager / Using the Edition Manager

Modifying a Subscriber

When the user selects data or clicks the data area of a subscriber, you should highlight the entire contents of the subscriber using inverse video. Although you shouldn't allow a user to edit the information in a subscriber, you can allow a user to make global adornments to subscribers. In other words, users can change the font, size, or other characteristics of the entire subscriber. For example, a user might select a subscriber within a document and change all text from plain to bold. However, you should discourage users from modifying the individual elements contained within a subscriber--for example, by editing a sentence or rotating an individual graphic object.

Remember that each time a new edition arrives for a subscriber, any modifications that the user has introduced are overwritten. Global changes to a subscriber are much easier for your application to regenerate.

Note

Although adornments should be global and never partial, you may still need to give users the ability to select portions of a subscriber, for instance, when performing spell checking and search-and-replace operations.

If you do allow a user to edit a subscriber section, provide an
enable/disable editing option within the subscriber options dialog box using the SectionOptionsExpDialog function, described in "Customizing Dialog Boxes" beginning on the next page. When you allow a user to edit a subscriber, you should change the subscriber from a selected state to editable data.

Because a user can modify a publisher just like any other portion of a document, its subscriber may change in size as well as content. For example, a user may modify a publisher by adding two additional columns to a spreadsheet.