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Next question (sorry). I need to make a requestor a little more sophisticated 
than the default ones. I already have a main window opened. I need 
to open this requestor on top but wait for user input. I've fooled 
around with do-events and show-popup but not getting the needed behavior.

My only beef with inform is that It is not so easy to impliment a 
window without border or title bar...I'm sure its possible but I 
have not looked into it too deep...

That's true. Congratulations on your FDNY project. and speaking of 
window titles, Nick A wrote a nice script for changing titles in 
a windows environment: http://www.rebol.org/view-script.r?script=title-bar.r
(unless you really like having "Rebol" in the title bar.

just discovered a nasty bug in view event handling...  anyone found 
a way to solve the following:


if you remove a face from a layout within the action of that face, 
its "away" engage feel gets stuck until you click on something... 


everytime you hover over something else, its away function is called 
even though its not even displayed in the view anymore!

Simple, a new "down-face" is set when you click down (so the old 
one is forgotten).

I don't think it can be simulated. (You can try sending a fake 'down 
event to the engage, but I think I probably tried that.) The setting 
of the "down-face" happens in native code in DO EVENT somewhere.

anyhow, it should be RAMBO'ed, so others can see it as a known bug.

what happens here is that a down event always expects (and creates) 
an up event ... but since the face is removed while in the handling 
of the down event it gets mixed up and this face gets stuck somewhere 
deep  in the view core and it ends up with a reference to a face 
which isn't displayed anymore... so it tries to get that (away)  
event  to trigger over and over .


what I fear most is that the face will end up leaking RAM. but tests 
have not shown it to be the case so far.

A down event does not create an up event. You letting go of the mouse 
button creates the up event.

there is always an up event corresponding to the down event for a 
face you clicked on, even if the face is removed from you or you 
aren't releasing the mouse over it.

  there is also a move event triggered each time for some obscure reason.

The reference to the "down-face" is probably stored by View in a 
single variable. When you click down again on another face, that 
reference is changed, so (I assume) there should be no problem.

yes and it continues to send it away events every time you cross 
the boundry of a face !

anyone know a way to prevent text-list from picking more than one 
item with ctrl?

I need some clairfication in reading the syntax/specs for Rebol2.x 
stuff.
I'm sure there is a pattern, but I havn't seen it yet.

Example: taken from rebol.net/wiki/VID:_Styles#Derived_styles_2

TEXT-LIST
   size: pair!
   rows: block!

   selected: block! ; this way set-face will not work. need to solve 
   this.
   action: block!
   background: tuple!
   background-draw: block!

how do I know when to assign a value to a [word] i.e. 

lo: [text-list size: 300x200]		;;does not work 
view layout lo

and when not to use the [word] such as 

lo: [text-list 300x200] 	;; works
view layout lo


Question 2. Could someone give a one line (short as possible) example 
of setting all the values for this text-list keyword using this format 
lo: [text-list ......]
view layout lo

thanks in advance.

The documentation you've pointed to seems related to R3, not R2.x. 
There's no header info in that page, so just guessing. 

You'll find REBOL 2.x view documentation here : http://rebol.com/docs.html

More precisely:
http://rebol.com/docs/view-guide.html

http://rebol.com/docs/easy-vid.html#section-14	(for TEXT-LIST examples)


About your question, here's a more complete example (not sure that 
all possible options are there, thought) :


lo: [text-list 300x200 yellow blue data ["one" "two" "three"] [print 
"action"]]
view layout lo

Thank you both.  Is it possible to create columns as well or is text-list 
a single column entity?

AFAICT, text-list is single column. Henrik has done some nice new 
components for VID, his LIST-VIEW style should fullfill your needs. 
Have a look at : http://www.hmkdesign.dk/rebol/page0/page0.html

Here's a quick link to what you're looking for : http://www.hmkdesign.dk/rebol/list-view/docs/list-view.html#section-3

thanks for the links.  I do have that list-view, I was trying to 
find a smaller way out.  It was missing one or two features I was 
wanting last I checked, and didn't feel like pouring over the source 
code.  about 100 pages.  My brain would take quite a few months to 
understand it.   Excellent software though.  I'll give it some more 
thought, and thanks again for the vid-notes link.  It looks very 
clean.

If you want a small solution, you can use the LIST style, but it's 
a bit more complex to work with. You can find some examples in the 
vid-usage.r script (look of some examples is horrible, but it will 
show you how to build custom multi-column lists).

well.... looking back through my coded examples... I actually have 
a good working list-box with over l000 rows with the columns correctly 
spaced.  However, its missing some necessary features, one of which 
is how do i attach the vertical scrollbar to the list box.   I tried 
the vid-usage.r script but perhaps I must have missed some key elements. 
 I'll try looking at that again.

I wrote a quick example to show you how to achieve that : ]

That is an excellent example.  Answered many questions I had (and 
raised a few more).  Thank you for taking the time to show me this 
Dockimbel.

I'm glad it helped you. It was a good opportunity for me to refresh 
my memory about the (powerful but under-documented) LIST style.

In case you're wondering about the block after SUPPLY, it's used 
internally by the LIST style to build an iterating function defining 
a local context where COUNT refers to the current row and INDEX to 
the current column. Each horizontally positionned face (purpose of 
the ACROSS keyword) defined in the LIST layout block, is counted 
as a column, so: txt 100 txt 100 => 2 columns.

I'm need to get the name I assigned a face when I alt-click on it. 
I can get its style, offset, size etc but I do not see a way to get 
the face's name. More specificly I have multiple scroll-panels and 
I need to know the one I'm clicking in...

a: scroll-panel [blah blah blah
b: scroll-panel [blah blah blah

I want to know if I clciked in scroll-panel a or b

if event/type = 'alt-down [face/style]

...gives me 'scroll-panel'

how do i get 'a' or 'b'

Sorry for the possible confusion but its one of anton's styles but 
did not think it would make a diff.

face = a ??

Is that because its Anton's style or is that a rebol thing for all 
faces?

face/var is set during layout for all faces that have a set-word! 
attached.

you can also set it yourself like this:

scroll-panel [with: 'a]

scroll-panel with [var: 'a]

but when you do that, there is no global word set. it can still be 
useful however, if you desire to recognize a face using different 
means, like traversing a pane for a specific face.

Must be a VID thing.  Rebgui doesn''t do this AFAIK

I always setup stuff in the object directly using the with block. 
I was just amazed that after so long, such a feature is still unknown 
to me.  :-)

Yes, probably because not all faces in the system are VID faces. 
A VID face is an extension of system/standard/face with several facets 
added, including VAR.

If the event handler came across a non-VID face, then face/var is 
an invalid path.

So you see, this is an example of why using this method to identify 
a face is more brittle.
You should better use:

	face = my-scroll-panel

to determine identity of a face.

Aha, I know what's probably happening. The scroll-panel contains 
a number of subfaces in a face hierarchy. You are probably not clicking 
on the scroll-panel face, but on one of its subfaces (which are laid 
on top of it, event-wise). If you look at scroll-panel.r, near the 
bottom of the rebol header, you will see the face hierarchy, with 
the two scrollers, the CROP-BOX and the SUBFACE inside the crop-box. 
The SUBFACE covers most of the area of the scroll-panel, and the 
two scrollers take some from the sides.

You can test this idea by giving the scroll-panel an edge, then alt-clicking 
on the edge. You should get a positive identification then. But of 
course, this is probably not very useful to you. What (I assume) 
you will need to do is, given a face, find out if it is inside a 
scroll-panel (or inside a particular scroll-panel of yours). This 
is a little bit complicated, but I have done most of that coding 
already for  mouse roll-wheel scrolling. (See scroll-wheel-handler.r, 
and demo-scroll-wheel-handler.r for how to use it.)

Basically, you will want to make your own "right-click-handler.r", 
just copying scroll-wheel-handler.r's code and modifying the event 
type that is checked for to 'alt-down. Scroll-wheel-handler checks 
for an Anton-extended VID flag, SCROLL-WHEEL, to determine which 
face should handle the event. So I might also advise you define your 
own VID flag to indicate that a face handles alt-click, maybe call 
it simply ALT-DOWN like the event that triggers it, or CONTEXT-MENU-ACTIVE, 
or whatever you're doing. Then make sure that the faces you want 
to respond to your "right-click-handler.r" are flagged with this 
new flag.
That's all, simple!

I think I see what you are saying, but...
Sounds like more than I want to tackle right now...

I think I'm going to stick with hacking up scroll-panel.r (since 
it seems to work)...the whole app feels like a hacked mess anyway 
so when R3 is ready I'll rewrite it for R3...Where I hope alot of 
these problems will not exist..

Thank you for the help

doesn't each face have a value for parent-face ?

That's exactly what I'm doing in scroll-wheel-handler.

Starting with the face clicked on, I climb up to the parent-face 
iteratively until I find an ancestor of the face which is a scroll-panel.

(or until there is no parent-face, which means we are at a top-level 
window face.)

amacleod, I thought all that complication would make you pause. And 
fair enough. I should say though that I've done the scroll-wheel-handler 
in the most proper way I can. It seems a pity not to take advantage 
of its structure. Anyway, it would be nice if you could say what 
you want to handle alt-click for. I'm still not sure why you want 
it. If that's clear to me, then I could probably make the new handler 
for you pretty quickly, as I'm more familiar with my code, obviously.

Incidentally, the VID Extension Kit has a lot of functions to help 
in these situations for finding a specific face.

To for example find the window a face sits in:

root-face face

face/edge is an object, not a block

because the lo block you constructed contains a dialect, not rebol 
code.

When you call the layout function, the dialect is processed and the 
values [edge [...]] are translated to code [face/edge: make face/edge 
[...]]

Thanks.  I'll let the brain gears process this for a while.

you can see the source of the layout function to have an idea of 
how the dialect is processed.

But layout is an obfuscated function with too much dependencies with 
other hidden functions.

It's rather difficult to have a whole understanding of how it works.
It reclaims several years of training.

it won't work, because the edge is not a dialect keyword outside 
of 'with.

Thanks. That opens my eyes to what I refer to as Rebol Voodoo. One 
can easily forget the relationship between a dialect and Rebol. Good 
stuff.

It's the central point with Rebol, when a function is accepting a 
block as input, you can't  guess if it will be processed as pure 
rebol code, list of data, or as a dialect (mixed data and commands).
Data is code, Code is data. Never forget.

Are you kidding? It took me a long time before I stopped turning 
everything into a string with my own functions! :-)

i meant you can't guess until you read the documentation of a specific 
function.
'help and 'source are they magic keys.

Having trouble changing the data in a drop-down list...

mylist/list-data: new_stuff 
show mylist

works the first time but not there after

I left the old "do" trick which allows one to easily scan a face 
to look up how it works... not sure many realize they can do this.

I was hoping to use the 'drop-down' style (not choice)...is there 
a difference with the function?

/Command is not a command line switch, it's a REBOL product : http://rebol.com/command.html.
/Command is also included in REBOL/SDK.

you need a range of libraries to run it with View. it works fine 
with View.

that shouldn't be necessary. I run it fine on a headless Linode server.

Testing on a linux server with Xlibs installed (but no X server) 
:

# sdk/tools/rebview
** User Error: Bad face in screen pane!
** Near: size-text self

# sdk/tools/rebface
REBOL/View 2.7.6.4.2 (15-Mar-2008)
Copyright 2008 REBOL Technologies
REBOL is a Trademark of REBOL Technologies
All rights reserved.

Set-Net not provided.

>>

Some features are locked until you purchase a commercial license 
from RT.

Any one have a "disapearing scroller bar problem?  i've tracked the 
bug down to the various redraw funcs in the scrollpane... but can't 
seem to fix it...


the ridiculous thing is that the bar disapears when you active the 
window the scrollbar is in!  go to/from another window and "sometimes" 
the scroller knob offset gets set to some improper value, and it 
disapears.

Has anyone written a to-do list manager?  There was one on IOS but 
I don't have the client for that anymore, and my recall is that it 
was fairly basic.

When last I heard, the guy got a job doing .NET stuff or some such 
and stopped developing AGG two years ago. Afaik he changed the license 
from BSD for 2.4 to GPL for 2.5, saying that "all future development" 
would be to the GPL version. However, the license change was the 
only difference between 2.4 and 2.5, and there was no future development. 
All afaik. So, abandoned, but BSD-licensed so who cares?

re Cairo: Cairo seems to be popular mainstream. But AGG is used in 
a lot commercial projects silently so it is hard to tell. The facts 
are:  
1. Cairo is slower than AGG.(when comparing SW rendering)

2. Cairo is a graphics library, AGG is a 'kit' to build graphics 
libraries.

compound rasterizer: well, this is another type of rasterizer(which 
has been already implemented into AGG2.4 codebase). I haven't made 
any perofrmance tests comparing the scanline AA rasterizer we are 
using but it could be a bit faster because this method shouldn't 
redraw objects one over another.(ie it renders the image 'flattened') 
I can't tell you how much faster it could be but the more layers 
you are using the bigger difference could be seen.

anyone know how to break a call to wait []  so wait returns?

ex: a button with something like [kill-wait] in its action.

yeah, I had to patch wake event to add the functionality... would 
be nice to be able to interrupt a wait outside of its event handling. 
 is this doable in R3?

did anyone do a VID compatible tree view control.  the only one I 
can find is the one within rebol.org from the request-dir.r script.


not that its bad, just probing to see if there are others which would 
work more quickly for this project where I need it.

if you are inside wait, you are inside the event handling. so "interrupt 
a wait outside of its event handling" makes no sense to me.

the event handling dispatches code related to the event that triggered 
it.  there is no way for that code to interrupt the even handler, 
especially when the event handler isn't programmed by yourself.


when you add wait []  in a function, there are many reasons why to 
want that wait to return.  in this case, modal operation of some 
code.


wait is a nested system where a second call to wait doesn't break 
the first call to wait.  


To allow this I had to patch view's wake-event directly, but it works 
now.. 


 there is no way for a normal action to interrupt event handling a 
 part from closing all windows, which made this modal operation of 
 my code especially complex to build without an interruption mechanism.


I've had other situations like having a systray and view not collaborating, 
where closing a window ends the app even when the systray is running, 
or where the window wait keeps running even if all windows are closed 
and the systray was then hidden as well.   a timer event would have 
easily solved that issue by interrupting appropriate event handlers 
when it detects some situations.

yep... but an  'interrupt mechanism would be nice to have.  it makes 
a lot of stuff much easier to architecture especially when you have 
multiple ports to handle and state is complex.  you can just add 
a loop which includes all event handlers and interrupt all of them... 
check some states and then decide if you re-enable some or all of 
them, until you decide to stop the loop.


this way, a view event, can also interrupt network xfer for example.

Is there a way to receive wm_gestures ?  Will this be added to an 
enhanced R2 ?

I think you should be able to receive this event thru system port 
(not tested).

The main problem is that there is a bug in system port so the events 
(in general) aren't detected unless rebol console is opened.

It would be great improvement if this is fixed in new R2  release 
but you need to push Carl ;)

My new laptop with multitouch screen has just arrived .. the surface 
demos are interesting ... using two - four fingers to manipulate 
images, or a virtual earth.  Now .. it would be nice if R2 or 3 can 
support this!

I'm contemplating getting one and would like to know how well Rebol 
View apps work with it.  I'm assuming they'd work just fine, but 
don't have the kind of money that I can take a chance  ;-)

Graham, did you happen to look at the HP Touchsmart (12.1")?  I see 
it offere at the local big-box stores for about $900 Canadian.  Gave 
it a try and it seemed like a nice machine.

Brock .. no.  I bought a touchsmart IQnnnn ( 19 inch wide I think 
) for someone else but I don't think it was multitouch.

Yes, the TX2 is what I was actually looking at.  I'll have to see 
if I can find a comparison of the two units.

having trouble with checkbox updating...

this works > chbx1/data: true show chbx1

but if I take the state from a block >
blk: [ "String" true]
chbx1/data: blk/2
IT DOES NOT WORK.

I've also insured its a logic value with> chbx1/data: to-logic blk/2

Any ideas?

to-logic on a word is always true:

>> to-logic 'true
== true
>> to-logic 'false
== true

Got it! Thanks a lot, Henrik.!

I did not know that about to-logic...
not mentioned in "Word browser"

I'm trying to print a vid face face via conversion to image...
what's the best way to get good text quality...
ie...is the a best font to use...
my out put is a little jaggy

Maxim, so to display a proper page I would need to increase the sacel 
of my vid image quite a bit...larger than screen?

when I was doing an art project, I had to create a printout for a 
36 inch wide image... the file was an 508 mb, 300 dpi image.

for printing from REBOL, the best thing is to use one of the variations 
of the PDF dialects out there and printing that out.  there are a 
few guys around here who have some experience doing this.

I was using a print method calling MS image viewer transparently 
to print without opening up but I as adivised to keep my image at 
612x792 to keep it on one page...how do increase 5x  now?

you need to set the dpi of the printout to a higher value.  I don't 
know about that solution, but either it supports the dpi value of 
the input image, when it has one, or you should be able to set it 
directly.

612 / 72 = 8.5  ;-)  so your values are standard video dpis

I played around with it...
AGG looks great on screen but prints fuzzy like you said...
Increasing resolution looks sharp on printout...

I do not know if I should spend time playing with scaling or just 
biting the bullet and converting output to HTML or pdf ...I had planned 
on it anyway but as usual what I thought would be a quick one or 
two day project turns into a week to make it "right"...

But always an opportunity to learn new stuff!

the pdf conversion should actually be pretty easy.  look it up. pdf 
maker supports images, vector art... and its a dialect IIRC so it 
should be a big thing to go from your view layout to this other dialect.

with R3, someone is bound to make a client for the windows printing 
engine  :-)

Is this a VID bug??

>> view layout [ led 20x20 ]
>> view layout [ led 20x20 [] ]

Hard to say it's a bug because there never was any documentation 
on the LED face

RE: printing vid faces by converting them to images for document 
printing...


I found that a multiplier of 3 is sufficient for good quality text...maybe 
5x for super quality

I'd say it's a bug Graham.

should ask Carl for a copy of the VID related bug reports so that 
you can fix them in vidext :)

How do you force a window to the front?  setting the activate flag 
and show doesn't seem to work