Hello,
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Ian and Sarah: Thank you for your earlier, you got me started in the right direction and I know have a much better understanding of Revolution (although I am sure i have only scratched the surface)...
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(I hope that isn't considered a non-plain text message.. ;-) )
I have a couple of observations and a couple of questions... To be efficient, I will just list them all here, I apologize ahead of time for the long message......
#1. I am using the Mac version of Revolution and it seems *extremely* unstable... I have at least one reproducable error, which goes something like this: (which , of coruse this will go away once I finish my evaluation and decide to purchase it)
Step 1. Begin writing a script
Step 2. Write enough code so you exceed the 10-line limit by only one line.
Step 3. Try to save it
Step 4. Comment out a line
Step 5. Attempt to save and watch-it-crash
There are many other times and ways it crashes, but I haven't been able to nail it down (yes I disable the sprocket extensions)...
#2. I have a stack with a substack... And the substack needs to get access to the controls on it's parent stack.... I can do this if I specify the name of the stack (for example: answer the short name of stack "my stack"), but I can't seem to do it by stack number... (For example: answer the short name of stack 0)... Is there any way to unambiguously refer to the stack on which a substack belongs to?.. I even tried : answer the short name of word 5 of stack topStack but it failed on this, probably because of the quotes surrounding it I guess?... The bottom line is, is there some way to do this?...
#3. When you are referring to a "font size" in Revolution are they in "pixels" or "points"?... Do they differ betwen OS's?... I have a specified amount of space on a page in which to place the information a user is entering (like a form, but different) and I want to make sure that when this app is moved to a different platform that the font sizes will fit..... Assume that it is a "courier new" font (monospace) for this one.....
#4. What I have done is setup the "main stack" as a data-entry screen for the user and a substack which contains the printed page(s)... The reason I have done this, I guess, is because the data entry screen is not laid out the same as the printed screen.... Have I done this correctly or is my approach non-standard?...
#5. Perhaps this question is more suited to a fontologist (is there such a thing?), but I'll post it here just in case anyone knows.... Because of the limited amount of space available to print information, I have to in some cases use some pretty small fonts, which print properly but on the screen are difficult to read.... Is it possible to simply increase the font size by a couple of sizes for the screen?.... At first, this might seem obvious (sure you can), but it's a bit more complex then that.... I actually allow the user to change the font size.. So imagine something like this:
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX <--- field 1
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX <--- field 2
When the substack is opened I have a function which basically analyzes the controls on the top page and begins to populate itself with the information.... It has to be able to create the second field directly below the first one and the "field" which contains them needs to be sized correctly to contain the text.... So if I decrease the "font size" by two (points or pixels?), will decreasing the size of the field by two (pixels) allow the font to fit?... It seems like I also may need to adjust the "margin" field...... I have done some preliminary tests and come up with the following:
(assuming a courier new font)
HEIGHT OF BOX PRINT HEIGHT OF BOX
FONT SIZE ON DISPLAY FONT SIZE ON PRINT
-------------- ------------- --------- -------------
10 14 9 10
12 18 ? ?
14 23 ? ?
I guess what I am thinking about doing with this is to just allow them to select "Small/Medium/Large" for the font sizes, but what I am really wondering is there anyway to perform the font calculations within Revolution so that it would be more font and size independent (assuming that the font sizes are NOT in pixels, which would seem to be the case)?......
#6. When I am programmatically creating new fields on my "print form" to contain the text, do I have to remove them when I am finished or the next time the form is printed will the old fields still be there?.....
#7. Originally what I wanted to do was set a TIFF image (converted to a PNG) as a background for the printed page... However, it seems like I can only use 72dpi images, which when printed look terrible.... As a test I tried to create a substack with a size of 2550 x 3300 (8.5 x 11 at 300dpi)... First of all, since there does not seem to be any "zoom out/zoom in" feature, the screen was so big it took a lot of effort just to move around to see it all (even at my monitors resolution of 1920 x 1080), perhaps a zoom in/out feature would be nice.. ;-) Secondly, I couldn't even get the image to load onto the page it kept crashing, even when I increased the memory of revolution to 768mb.... So next I tried the equivalent of a 150dpi image and it would do that without crashing and the printout was a LOT better, but still not good enough (I used the "into" clause of the print command)... Is there some other way to handle this which would give me the results I am looking for but in an efficient way?....
Thanks!
- Greg
