Cincom Smalltalk™ Foundation Series:  Text 2

Here are just a few areas of new capability in text handling:

• Annotations
• Adornments
• Alignments
• Actions
• Cursors
• Fonts
• Unicode
• Bidirectional content
• Sparklines
• Lists
• Embedded images

These are significant upgrades. For example, annotations allow information to be conveyed without embedding it in the text, bidirectional content enables advanced internationalization and sparklines allow mini graphs to be embedded within the text.

If you significantly improve something that’s used everywhere in the product, like text, you significantly improve the potential of everything you can do with the product.

Capability

So what makes these changes so significant?  For one, Text2 is very capable.  Within the document, you can use things like:

• Word wrapping
• Line numbers
• Paragraph numbers
• Line striping
• Hidden characters
• Read-only

In paragraphs, you can use:

• Directions
• Alignment
• Paragraph spacing

In terms of alignment, you can:

• Indent
• First line indent and use padding left, right, center and justify

The fonts can be changed according to family, size, color, bold/italics and variable sizes in the same line.   Adornments on a document can have strikethroughs, underlines, double underlines, dashed underlines and more, as well as overline and shadow.  Clicking on text can produce an action like running code or opening up a browser.  If you want to use annotations, you can annotate with text and use hover-help, wrap, dodge and stretch.

The cursor change properties include bull’s eye, caret, crosshair, database, earth, hand, marker, scroll, square, wait and hyperlink.  Text2 also includes sparklines.  The goal of Sparkline is to represent data inline.

In addition, other features of Text2 allow for vertical alignment within lines and bidirectional content with support for embedded direction marks.  Unicode provides font measuring and rendering.  Images can also be placed within the documents, and lists can be bulleted or numbered and contain international numbering schemes.  There is also sparse editing history to support large documents.

Performance

Some of the new features in Text2 also provide better performance.  Smart Algorithms, for example, allow Text 2 to do things quickly that Text could not do at all.  Treap is a binary search tree that is used in the document and acts like a dictionary and a double-linked list.

Accessible

In Cincom VisualWorks 8.0, we introduced three new widgets based on Text2 for customers who needed that capability:

• DocumentView
• DocumentEditor
• InputEditor

In addition, there is a new SourceCodeEditor, Refactoring Browser, Debugger, Workspace, Trippy and Launcher.

> To view a demo of Text2, watch this video here or play it below: