[squeak-dev] Proposal: Morphs in Text

Marcel Taeumel marcel.taeumel at hpi.de
Thu Jul 4 06:23:55 UTC 2019


> Isn't it incredible?!  3.8 was the first release we stopped including this, so little surprise that we broke it, but I do hope we you get this fixed up again so that a cool demo like this at 
> least could be done in 5.3 if we wanted.

We should write more tests. :-) Such examples are nice to learn from. Yet, they cannot replace automated testing. There have been several bugs in the recent past despite objects (or games or apps) being in the release image to reveal them.

Best,
Marcel
Am 03.07.2019 21:32:15 schrieb Chris Muller <asqueaker at gmail.com>:
Hi Patrick,

I agree that the drag and drop handling of TextMorphs is somewhat complex by now.  While looking into the issue I found two kinds of issues: some more general ones and one related to layouting.

## General Occlusion Bug

I have to admit that I was not aware of the avoid occlusions feature. I dug into it a little and
found TextContainer and the class comment which explains the feature. Then I constructed
the following example:

o := Morph new.
tm := TextMorph new
        contents: 'This is a very long text with a lot of characters
spanning multiple lines overall and throughout the
place in order to trigger the occlusion thing';
        yourself.
m := RectangleMorph new.
m position: tm topLeft + (10 at 10).
tm occlusionsOnOff.
o addMorph: tm.
o addMorph: m.
o openInWorld.

I tried it in trunk and Squeak 3.8 and in both it results in errors in NewParagraph>>#adjustRightX as
it expects container to behave like a rectangle.


Squeak 3.7 was the last release we included "The Worlds of Squeak" demo project that showed off its capabilities, including its powerful text-handling.  One of my favorite demos to show people was typing into that upper-left bubble (under "Squeak Rulez") and watch:

    - text being inserted flowing into the next morphs!
    - even along that spline!
    - and into that lower box with an embedded Morph that demonstrating occlusion avoidance!

[dtp-level-text-handling.png]


Selecting that yellow ellipse in the lower-right box and dragging it around forces the text to reformat around the shape of the ellipse (e.g., not even just a simple rectangle!).

Isn't it incredible?!  3.8 was the first release we stopped including this, so little surprise that we broke it, but I do hope we you get this fixed up again so that a cool demo like this at least could be done in 5.3 if we wanted.

Best,
  Chris


 

However, the root cause seems to be that #adjustRightX does not make sense when having a fixed
TextContainer as it describes the individual rectangles in which the text can be set. One solution is
to set `tm wrapFlag: true` before turning avoidOcclusions on (otherwise #wrapFlag triggers a relayout
without tm having an owner which does not work...).

To make this more robust I would propose:
1.) When activating occlusion we also set the wrapFlag
2.) We do not try to avoid occlusions as long as the morph does not have an owner yet.

## Text Anchor Related

Maybe this is more what you were thinking about Karl: I found that when having the above example
plus an anchored morph which is layouted inline most things work fine. Except for the layout issue
you can see in the attachment (the first morph in the third line is the anchored morph, the second one
is the m from the example above). The second part of the third line does not adhere to the offset of the
first part of the line. @Karl: Did you refer to that? (Not sure how to fix this yet...)

Bests
Patrick
________________________________________
From: Squeak-dev <squeak-dev-bounces at lists.squeakfoundation.org [mailto:squeak-dev-bounces at lists.squeakfoundation.org]> on behalf of karl ramberg <karlramberg at gmail.com [mailto:karlramberg at gmail.com]>
Sent: Monday, July 1, 2019 11:44:34 AM
To: Chris Muller
Cc: The general-purpose Squeak developers list
Subject: Re: [squeak-dev] Proposal: Morphs in Text

One big issue with the drag and drop is that it is often not clear which morph one drop into.
There are so many layers of morphs in a text window so it gets confusing to know which morph to actually
enable to accepting the drop.

But drag and drop are probably a separate issue from text anchors constructed from
code. Just don't break it to badly  :-)


Best,
Karl



Best.
Karl



On Mon, Jul 1, 2019 at 2:19 AM Chris Muller <ma.chris.m at gmail.com [mailto:ma.chris.m at gmail.com]<mailto:ma.chris.m at gmail.com [mailto:ma.chris.m at gmail.com]>> wrote:
> I'm a little late here.
> TextMorph does not really need TextAnchor I think.
> You can just drop morphs on the text and select avoid occlusions in the menu.
> What are the use of text anchors instead just dropped in morphs ?
> I filed in TextAnchorPlacement change set and it interferes somewhat with the avoid occlusions functions.

I was wondering about the 'avoid occlusions' but spent all my focus on
the alignment testing, thanks for testing that too!

We should not break that.  I like this new alignment capability, but
classic DTP text-handling is one of Squeak's most impressive
capabilities.  Hopefully an easy fix..?


 - Chris

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