Re: Possible activity heading towards XyWrite replacement

[Bill Troop billtroop@xxxxxxxx]

Doesn't this imply that formatting of the 'pure' text stream is done
by pointers, as was done in MSW format for the longest time? I think
that is a bad approach -- surely one of the reasons for problems with
MSW documents. Moreover, it has transpired that there is not a single
MSW pointed-based document that cannot be translated into an
equivalent, format-embedded .rtf document, a document type which is
known to be more stable. So who cares if the text stream is pure or
not? Anything which needs to examine the text string can do so
whether there are colour-formatting (or other formatting) codes there
or not - - n'est ce pas? Certainly this task would not bother XyWrite
in the least.

At 8/27/2008 04:58 AM, you wrote:
> The issue is not how the character is
> displayed -- it's that the color attribute is information that can be
> attached individually to each character in a buffer, without changing the
> text itself in the buffer, and the attribute can later be examined by
> macros, for whatever purpose. For example, in a file of 100000 characters,
> I could mark (as the result of a search, for example) 5 or 50 or 500 or
> 5000 different words (or whatever) that I wanted to "come back to" for
> some reason, by setting a particular color attribute for the individual
> characters in the 5/50/500/5000 words, and later find these "marked" words
> with a macro, but without having modified the actual text of the file one
> iota.