Inside Macintosh: Text /

Chapter 2 - TextEdit

About TextEdit

TextEdit was originally designed to handle editable text items in dialog boxes and other parts of the system software. Although TextEdit has been enhanced to provide more text-handling support since its inception, especially in its handling of multi-script text, it retains some of its original limitations. TextEdit was not originally intended to manipulate lengthy documents or text requiring more than rudimentary formatting. For example, TextEdit does not handle tabs. (Your application can provide support for tabs to supplement TextEdit.)

However, TextEdit handles some of the cumbersome tasks that a text processor needs to perform, and provides you with an alternative to writing your own text processor. For example, when you use TextEdit routines to edit text, your application does not need to allocate memory for blocks of text that change dynamically during the editing session because TextEdit takes care of this for you. When the user selects a range of displayed text of a TextEdit edit record, TextEdit recognizes this and responds by highlighting
the text.

TextEdit relies on the Script Manager, QuickDraw, and Text Utilities to handle text correctly, and eliminates the need for your application to call these routines directly. Because TextEdit supports text from more than one script system and manages scripts having different primary line directions, you can use its routines and features to develop applications that support multiple languages.

TextEdit uses Text Utilities routines: the FindWordBreaks procedure for determining word breaks and the StyledLineBreak function for determining line breaks. TextEdit also allows you to customize how word boundaries and line breaks are defined.

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Subtopics

TextEdit and Standard Macintosh Features

Multistyled and Monostyled Text

Font and Keyboard Script Synchronization

Cutting, Copying, and Pasting Text

The TextEdit User Interface

The TextEdit Private, Null, and Style Scraps

An Overview of the TextEdit Data Structures