On Apr 23, 2007, at 11:39 AM, Arnaud Nicolet wrote: > Do you know how one can make an encoding? > Say I want to make an encoding named "Arnaud" (a really strange > encoding where letters are animated and in half-blue and half-green), > how could I start?
On Apr 23, 2007, at 1:24 PM, Arnaud Nicolet wrote: > You're right, indeed. I was just thinking, for example, to this > symbol: > ☆ > > Could I invent such a "character", but that automatically appears > blue by definition? > (well, I admit I'm too curious). Having slept on our encoding discussion from yesterday, I'm wondering if what you want to do is simply display special characters rather than defining your own encoding. Something like chat programs or the forums do for the smilies they display. A chat program may see the characters ":)" come across and replace them with a smilie. Or replace the characters ";)" with a winking smilie. These aren't special encodings, they're just programs intercepting the data stream and acting on special circumstances. The easiest way to do this in an Editfield would be to find a font that contains the special characters you want to display. Something like Wingdings. These fonts don't use a special encoding, they just display special characters for standard encodings. For example the "J" in Wingdings displays a smilie "J". It's not a smilie character of some odd encoding, it's just a J but the font draws the smilie. You can type, sort, spell check, etc. in Wingdings. You may not be able to read it, but to the underlying system it's just a standard encoding. So if you were writing a chat program, you could detect an incoming ":)" and instead of displaying it that way in Times, you could display a yellow "J" in Wingdings and switch back to black Times for the following text. Using this approach you are limited to normal font capabilities -- one color per character, no animation, etc. A more difficult task would be to write your own EditField that would allow the insertion of animated GIFs (or other graphic format) into the text. Then you could have your two- or more colored text jumping and bouncing and singing a tune. Kirk ----------------------------------------------- REALbasic Professional 2007r1 MacBook Core Duo, Mac OS X 10.4.9 _______________________________________________ Unsubscribe or switch delivery mode: <http://www.realsoftware.com/support/listmanager/> Search the archives: <http://support.realsoftware.com/listarchives/lists.html>
