AltME groups: search

Leaving all RebGUI specialities aside, can't you just patch the widgets 
FEEL/ENGAGE to allow objects being passed to it? If there is a point 
where you're in control to FOCUS the face in question, that may be 
possible.

Thanks .. looks like send-keys solves my problem too :)  I needed 
to send a backspace to a rebgui field to initialize it and this works

for those who don't know how to change the title of a window in R2....

rebol []

win: view/offset/new layout [

 button 400x20"change window name" [ win/text: random "ogiue goiueng 
 oesigneso ginue sogine sgioun " win/changes: [text] show win]
] 200x200

do-events

It's known bug. At least Maxim was talking about it with Cyphre in 
OSX group a few days ago.

yes, its a BUG in AGG, using more than 2 values in line pattern will 
cause the crash.  its the oldest AGG bug I know of.


spoke with cyphre, its possible that this will be fixed in next release 
of R2, which shoudn't take more than a few weeks IMHO.

How does one capture whether a window is maximized or not?

I can see a maximize and a minimize event, but no restore event. 
And face/changes is cleared, when the event handler reads it. Not 
very useful.

face changes is used for the internal show to optimise if/what it 
should redraw. as such its a "write only" property, reading from 
it makes no real sense.


for example if you set changes to [offset] it will move the window 
MUCH faster than if you change offset & show without it.

I have a problem. Basically I need to know how to interupt a function 
that is looping. 

So this is what happens: The user presses "start" button which calls 
the printing routine. I want to be able to allow him to stop the 
process if he wishes by pressing a "stop" button. The issue is the 
face is only recording my attempts to stop. Any thoughts?

I usually set a flag with a button and try to read the flag in the 
loop. I'm not sure if it's easy to get an immediately responding 
button, though.

perhaps if you wait a short period prior to reading the flag in the 
loop.

I'll put a wait and see

So it looks -s and --secure don't behave same. Which can be a bug 
in current R2/View.

so maybe there is a bug within the secure function.  did you check 
on RAMBO?

that is strange.. I'll test it again in a few days, the PC is on 
a customer place..

hmm.. if I give a second color for VH2 then it works as expected. 
Some lastest changes affected this I think.

view layout [
    backdrop effect [gradient 1x1 180.0.0 0.0.100]
    vh2 "Layout Definition:" 200x22 yellow red
        effect [gradmul 1x0 50.50.50 128.128.128]

    vtext bold italic "Layouts describe graphical user interfaces."
    button "Remember" effect [gradient 0.0.0]
]

because the face is transparent, and modifying it (not creating new 
images) you have to merge the background... this change occured a 
long time ago (draw V2 IIRC).


in your second example, it works only because you set the face color, 
which is then multiplied. 

first example, fixed:

view layout [
    backdrop effect [gradient 1x1 180.0.0 0.0.100]
    vh2 "Layout Definition:" 200x22 yellow
        effect [ MERGE gradmul 1x0 50.50.50 128.128.128]

    vtext bold italic "Layouts describe graphical user interfaces."
    button "Remember" effect [gradient 0.0.0]
]

yeah, its been like that a long time, its just an edge case which 
people don't hit often.   you probably where using faces with colors 
and you didn't realize it.

There is a very annoying bug on View (2.7.8.3.1), can anyone confirm 
that? Please see the code below:

I can only find a workaround, I use #{A0} (no-break space, alt + 
0160) character instead of normal space #{20}. Then it works ok.

No it doesn't change the result.
To test it give a width for the text:

t: join head insert/dup copy "" " " 500 "test"
view layout [text 100x400 t white blue as-is]

test
 is still on the second line.

I tried as-is, line-list: none, I need to use wrap?: yes. Otherwise 
I have to my own wrap function which I don't have time to do.

I would call that a feature, not a bug.  The (normal) breaking space 
allows word wrapping to split between words, rather than in the middle 
of words...

How can you call that a feature? The text field is 100 pixels width, 
I put 500 space chars and then a word after that, and the word appears 
on the second line of the text field. Where is that 500 chars? Even 
if you insert new spaces (let say 1000 more) the word position doesn't 
change.

If you think it as a html document (all whilte-spaces treated as 
one space char) then why it stands on the second line?

And the problem is you cannot read a file and put it into a face/text 
IF the document have lots of spaces at the beginning, even if you 
use as-is.

Endo, this behavior is common to many, if not most, word wrapping 
algorithm. It makes no sense to wrap the spaces themselves to the 
second line; OTOH, it can be argued that it makes no sense to have 
more than one space in a sequence as well, so it's hard to say what 
is the best behavior.

Graham: I know this, but what if you should have those spaces?

Izkata: Yes this could an example as well. My second example shows 
the problem exactly.

Gabriele: I think the best behavior is to keep text as it is. (at 
least we should have this option, using as-is etc.)

If a text document is formatted with spaces (think that using a propotional 
font, take the old Amiga Autodocs files as example) you can never 
put those texts into a face/text. Face/text is not a document like 
html, even if it would be more than one space chars should be treated 
as one space char. 


So I'm still thinking that it is a word-wrap bug in the View engine.

Keeping text as is means not breaking lines. If you break them, you're 
not keeping it as is, and have to make a decision where to break 
it.

Should you break it at any point? Only before a space? Only after 
a space?


Imagine you have "aXXword" where I replaced spaces by an X. How would 
you break it?

a
XXword

aX
Xword

aXX
word


You're saying that REBOL should do like in the second example. That 
would be unacceptable in most cases though; REBOL does like in the 
third example, which is what makes the most sense in the most cases. 
You have a more specific case, where it's probably best to just use 
NBSP or to come up with your own line breaking algorithm.

Take the Izakata's example: you are inserting spaces to the beginning 
of a face/text. It "works" to some point and then it stops changing 
the face/text. (well it changes the text itself but doesn't show 
it on the face)

I mean that, it should somehow break the line even if the line has 
spaces (wrap before/after/somewhere). Take any text editor, they 
somehow does word-wrapping.

Think that you have two paragraph text and there are, say 100 spaces 
between them, you don't have a chance to put that text directly into 
a face/text. Replacing all spaces to NBSP is not a complete solution 
because NBSP is not a whitespace char so they are not wrapped until 
end-of-line. 

In the current situation: "if your face is 50px width and word wrap 
is on, then you cannot put 100 spaces between any two words in the 
face/text (face cannot display those text correctly)"
This looks still a major bug to me..

Ok, I tried different text editors to see the word wrap behaviours, 
they all have different behaviours. Now I see your point.

I thought that it is a bug (and still feel like that) because "it 
doesn't matter how many spaces you insert to the beginning, "test" 
doesn't move after some point" (How it should move? you asked, I 
don't know, but it SHOULD move somehow if I constantly add more spaces)

All the other tools (notepad, notepad++, editplus etc.) behaves different 
than each other. They wrap the line, if you add more spaces after 
some point they move (push) the text down or right or somewhere. 
But they move it anyway. They don't stop somewhere.
Anyway, thank you for your time & responses.

view layout [f: text-list data ["aaa" "bbb" "aaa" "ccc"] [probe f/picked]]

When I click on "aaa" both lines are selected. Do I missing something 
or is it a bug in text-list?
When use CTRL click, no chance to get both "aaa" in f/picked

It's probably a bug.

text-list uses the text itself as the key, so each string has to 
be different. if you can't use a better alternative for some reason, 
you could change the strings to something like "1) aaa" "2) bbb" 
"3) aaa" ... etc.

I see. Thank you.

As I see there is no chance to make face/data and face/texts for 
text-list, choice styles. When I change like face/data: copy ["a" 
"b" "c"] then face/texts is also syncronized. and vice-versa.

The only way is to use the index? of selected item on a block which 
holds item-data. Is that right?

Henrik: Thank you! I'll play VIDExt more! Is it stable enough to 
use in a production do you think?

I use it in a production environment, but it is continually improving, 
though I'm taking a break from it right now.

Ok. Thanks a lot.

I wrote a function to get a copy of a wrapped text in a face object. 
Please have a look at it. If you have a better idea please let me 
know:
http://rebolforum.com/index.cgi?f=printtopic&topicnumber=46


it uses offset-to-carret to find the line positions and inserts a 
newline to that position in the text.

Henrik, I wrote another version of the function which is a bit better. 
It could help about the bug you told.

The only problem is it it makes a copy of the given text. So it is 
not the same text anymore.
http://rebolforum.com/index.cgi?f=printtopic&topicnumber=46

I don't think copying the text is much of a problem.

Can anyone confirm this is a bug in View (VID), so I will post it 
to RAMBO:

gui: layout [f: h1 100 "test"]
f/text: does [probe "testing"]
view gui


;click on the text, drag --> crash rebol.exe. Tested on XP Pro SP3. 
View 2.7.8.3.1.1

;function get called when the text clicked, crash happens when dragging.

passing function to face/text is not a good idea, it's called (read) 
several times when an event occured. But crash problem may be fixed.

posted to RAMBO as a low importance bug.

Confirmed on Windows Vista -- I see "Testing" printed a few times 
and then
      Problem Event Name:	APPCRASH
      Application Name:	rebol.exe
      Application Version:	2.7.6.3
      Exception Code:	c0000005
      Exception Offset:	0002420b
      ....

2.7.6 on Linux, it prints "testing" a few times from the click event, 
then also segfaults on the drag


I'm guessing it has to do with how h1 and other text elements will 
try to highlight the text when you drag the mouse over it, but a 
function isn't really a series! value

CHOICE style performs a SHOW on top level window when clicked I think, 
and leads problems:

view layout [
	choice "a" "b" "c" [b/rate: 1] ;there is no "show b"
	b: box red rate none
	feel [engage: func [f a e] [if a = 'time [print now]]]
]

time events get fired without "show b"

Is there a way to scale an image using effect [draw [image pic]] 
without giving coordinates as in effect [ draw [image pic 0x0 200x200]]


I believe the coordinates are for location on in the frame and I 
just want it rendered inline with the rest of the vid objects

I'm running the latest Rebcore and Rebview on an Xubuntu box. My 
issue is that when I click on the REBOL folder icon at the top left 
of the "sidebar", I get a message saying something like: "Cannot 
open location http://www.rebol.com/index.r.Any ideas??

It's a maintenance issue that Rebol Tech needs to solve

It is really a not a good situation, that Carl can't fix that. I 
wrote an email to him on 7.9., asking him to start R3 Chat server, 
with no reply on his side. This is really not funny anymore. How 
can he assume that anoyne will trust him with any future project? 
Everybody of us is overloaded with work, but just don't tell me you 
can't find 10 minutes to fix basic issues?

Sorry!! hit the "Enter" key by mistake. Thanks all you guys for your 
input!  It is too bad that the a lot of the more publically visible 
aspects of REBOL are suffering from lack of maintenance. It does 
not make for a good "First impression" IMHO. Maybe Carl just doesn't 
give a shit anymore????

update on the REBOL folder icon issue -- All of a sudden it worked 
as expected!!  Just like that!! I'll try shutting down VIEW and see 
what happens.

Nope I just tried, and it doesn't work. Try http://www.rebol.com/index.r
on your browser you'll see a 404 page.

I of course use other programming laguages for my work. REBOL is 
mostly useful as a helper for me.

I use it to generate data, parse big files to extract something, 
automated FTP/HTTP/EMAIL jobs, small GUI applications.

Cheyenne Web Server is also a very good product. Take a look at it.

I see. I'm NOT new to Forthish languages, although I'm not very fluent 
in any of them. So REBOL appeals that way. I'm currently learning 
newLISP and so far it seems pretty good to me. I heard about Cheyenne 
- need to have a look. I use Hiawatha right now.

so I'm NOT connected to rebol.com. What do you think? Should I hang 
in there and try learning REBOL again, or move on?

 - if you are worried about a missing file on rebol.com affecting 
 your ability to learn REBOL, it's probably better to move on and 
 come back if/when there is more activity.

ha-ha-ha .... WTF!!  You mis-read my question completely!! I really 
don't give a shit about the missing file, bud. I'm concerned that 
maybe REBOL will be orphaned shortly, if it hasn't already.

That concern is on many people's minds, but the question is whether 
you will let that stop you. It does for example not stop me, being 
in a full time job working with REBOL.

Well there you go!!! That's like comparing aplles and oranges, right! 
 You ARE fluent in REBOL. No worries for there you! I'm NEW to REBOL 
- so I have to make a decision .....

True, but I'm not fluent in it, because Carl, the original creator 
of REBOL, was around. I'm fluent in it, because there are many extremely 
talented and helpful users in here, who know just about every single 
advantage and limitation in REBOL and know what type of programs 
can be developed in it.


Should Carl decide to abandon REBOL, there is a legacy in the shape 
of Orca, Red and Topaz and I'm sure there would be even more focus 
on these efforts by then. I stick around, not just because I have 
built my development infrastructure around it, but because I dearly 
love the language and I can be much more productive in it than anything 
else, I've tried, and that won't go away for a long time for me, 
because there is no indication to me that there will be anything 
around anytime soon, that will surpass it.

Also, while Carl was the original creator or REBOL, he isn't the 
only creator. A lot of the work was delegated or done for hire by 
others, and (especially for recent releases) most of those others 
are still here to answer questions and help people.

I'm trying to launch an "alert" window with an animated image while 
downloading a file. I've tried using "View/new" but the animation 
does not animate. What's a good way to get this effect?

How long does a single insert take??

There could be some number of image binaries so it takes as long 
as 10's of seconds to a minute....long enough to make user think 
program as frozen!

You could do the animation in a separate process and kill it when 
the transfer is done

or do the insert in a separate process and check the result while 
showing the animation.

I'm using Christopher Ross-Gill's animation style. I wrote a little 
function to convert an animated gif to an image file that the style 
can use....

Kaj, I thought about doing something like that but how do you kill 
the process from rebol?

I guess that's system dependent. You could also keep a status info 
or transfer process running and communicate with it via 0MQ

Re: animation, Nick wrote a cool example using "anim" in rebol.org

What "help" command to I need to issue in order to see what value 
are accepted by a refinement? e.g.
  view layout [
     button  ????
     size  ????

help layout/styles - didn't work
help layout styles - nope!
help layout styles button - nope!

So what is it?  :)

There is no built-in help to get the settings for the LAYOUT dialect 
(other than SOURCE LAYOUT....and a lot of code reading :).
Easiest starting point may be the user guide:
    http://www.rebol.com/docs/view-guide.html

Just did a bit of poking:

>> layout [X: button]
>> ? X/doc
X/DOC is an object of value: 
   info            string!   "rectangular, rendered buttons" 
   string          block!    length: 2 
   image           block!    length: 2 
   logic           none!     none 
   integer         string!   "width of button" 
   pair            string!   "width and height of button" 
   tuple           block!    length: 2 
   file            none!     none 
   url             none!     none 
   decimal         none!     none 
   time            none!     none 
   block           block!    length: 2 
   keywords        none!     none 

>> ? X/doc/block

X/DOC/BLOCK is a block of value: ["execute when clicked" "execute 
when alt-clicked"]
>> view layout [button [print "clicked"][print "alt-clicked"]]
clicked
alt-clicked

@izkata -- Much obliged!! BTW, works great with REBOL/Core 2.7.8.4.2 
(2-Jan-2011)

Just so I learn a bit more, can you tell me exactly what your code 
snippets are doing, please. Like:
layout [X: button]  ??

? X/doc => you're asking for help about the word X with the "doc" 
refinement

Where did the /doc come from?

@Geomol: Where do you X in ? layout ???

If I'm learning, how would I ever "guess" to do an ? X or ? X/doc 
???

Sure ! It's being defined by "layout" - but how is a noob suppose 
to know that? 


Originally, I wanted to get help with the "layout" refinements. To 
me, it seems intuitive to simply do:

? layout/styles

But I guess that's too easy :))

More poking around:

>> foreach [name style] system/view/VID/vid-styles [? name]
NAME is a word of value: face
NAME is a word of value: blank-face
NAME is a word of value: IMAGE
NAME is a word of value: BACKDROP
NAME is a word of value: BACKTILE
NAME is a word of value: BOX
.....more...

Duke, it's maybe not the easiest task to try to understand the graphical 
parts of REBOL as the first thing. Maybe get a feeling for how objects, 
functions and the other parts of the language works first?

For my previous snippet:

>> layout [X: button]

X is just a generic variable name I use when I need a throwaway, 
like others use "foo", "bar", and so on.  Layout is just assigning 
the button object to the word X, which I'm exploring in the next 
few lines like Geomol explained.


I explored system in the same way to find view, then VID, then vid-styles. 
 vid-styles is a block containing a series of alternating names and 
definitions, which the foreach loop is simply going over

@Izkata:  I understand your X now!  If /doc is simply a refinement 
to "help", then that fact is not showing up when "help" is entered 
by itself.

bottom line: I simply wanted to use the "help" system to explore 
 what's available in "layout" and how to use each component. I was 
assuming that the "help" system was a comprehensive reference. It 
may not have been designed as such.

You are being thrown off, because LAYOUT processes a dialect, which 
HELP has no chance of understanding.

It helps to understand, what LAYOUT is doing: As you may know, VID 
is a dialect, which is a parsed collection of words, numbers, strings, 
etc. in a specific format, essentially a sub-domain language, within 
REBOL. The job of LAYOUT is to parse the dialect block and convert 
that into a face tree (a face is just an object, try typing FACE 
in the console). The face tree can then be fed to the VIEW function, 
so the layout can be displayed, so:

VID -> layout -> view -> window displays with content


You can also create a face tree manually, but that's far more laborious, 
which is why VID is there.


When LAYOUT creates a face, it does so in accordance with a style 
from Izkata's shown style list, such as IMAGE or FIELD. A style is 
essentially a prototype face.

VID is however quite sparse, as it was written in a week, by Carl, 
a decade ago. There are some extensions and replacements available.

as it was written in a week, by Carl
 is that true? Cool or pity :)

That's what he told me some years ago. It was only meant to be a 
demo of View.

In the past I proposed help to use a refinement, e.g. /custom, /dialect, 
and the format would then be:

help/custom dialect-name "button"


It is a problem right now, as 'help uses just one argument. But maybe 
it could just accept more types, e.g. a block, and then we could 
have a dialect to help us with dialect help :-)

I think one solution is to add a uniform domain based dictionary 
(one domain for styles, one for VID, one for other dialects), that 
help understands, but it can unfortunately not make dialects themselves 
self documenting. Possibly there would be automated dictionary builders, 
but these take a lot of time to run during startup, so maybe they 
should be some sort of callbacks from help to get just-in-time help 
on a domain.

Then you could use:

>> help/on styles

to get a dictionary on the styles, based on a dictionary builder.

@GrahamC:  Thanks for clearing that up in a nutshell.

@Henrik  & Pekr:  IMHO, enhancing the "help" system as you suggest, 
is the greatest form of advocacy that the REBOL community can undertake. 
let the "help system" be as comprehensive as possible - whatever 
form it takes, so that REBOL novices are not faced with yet another 
source of stress and uncertainty - especially if they come from a 
non-Forthish or LISPish background. If a novice can solve - by himself, 
using the "help system" - what he perceives to be an ambiguity, already 
that is a success  which can only give impetous to continueing his 
exploration of REBOL.

Question:


If you have a window face and SHOW it, does it perform a different 
kind of SHOW, if the window face /CHANGES is set to TEXT or ACTIVATE? 
I have some problems refreshing a table along with changing the window 
title during the same SHOW.

I'm studying a possible font alignment bug with Cyphre:


view layout [origin 0x0 space 0x0 t1: text 100 black white "Boo" 
right t2: text 100 black 200.200.200 "Boo" right bold]


Does the last "o" line up to the same pixel for you (correct) or 
is there a slight misalignment (wrong)? State your OS, please. Thanks.

I posted in OSX group but I just noticed its a private group...anyway, 
just got a mac mini and I'm having trouble installing rebol. I run 
through the install process but it does not seem to to install properly 
for example it does not make a ".r" file association.

It doesn't seem to be able to do that, although I vaguely remember 
Robert may have found a method

Is there a method to find the active window? I actually thought I 
had this in the VID Extension Kit, but apparently not.

adding the event handler is very easy from mezz code.  its basically 
like a detect function, but executed at the screen level.   the face 
you receive is a window.

Worked for me when I used it .. have you tried a version of rebol 
from when the script was written?

Nope, I tried only with R2/view 2.7.8.3.1
But I found the crashed part, on line 251:

face/text: bud: pick users count  ;crash!, PICKing from users is 
ok, setting face/text crashes.

users is a block of something strange:
users/1 == <script type="text/javascript"> <!--
    top.location="http://www.reboltech.com/?fp=BSODCy... 


I think something changed on the server and return value is not a 
text anymore, so setting it to face/text lead to crash.

Anyone happen to have a copy of  the self modifying program I wrote 
in REBOL years ago?  The one tht displays itself, and then lets you 
modify itself?

A program that displays itself is a quine.
Some in the library, but none from Reichart
    www.rebol.org/search.r?find=quine

No, I did not put it in the lib, although I think Greg may have done 
another version of what I wrote and submitted it.

John too played with it and did something as well.  It is not a big 
deal, I can rewrite it , was just hoping to have the original, I 
might still have it somewhere.