[racket] text formatting questions

From: Neil Van Dyke (neil at neilvandyke.org)
Date: Sun Aug 22 23:13:54 EDT 2010

Mathew Kurian wrote at 08/22/2010 10:58 PM:
>
> 1. In a text editor like Microsoft Word, in what form do they hold all 
> the text that a person types (a single large string or just an 
> appendable textbox that stores the data till the end)?

There are several different approaches for conventional text editors, 
and they can get complicated.  If you want to read up, some good 
starting points to search for are "gap buffer" and "flexichains".  Once 
you start reading about these, you'll be led to some of the others.  
These approaches for one aspect of representing text are also combined 
with approaches to get the full model and view(s) used by the editor.  
You might also want to look at how different HTML-and-CSS rendering 
engines represent the data and views.

None of that is necessarily very relevant to what DrRacket does.  If you 
want to understand or extend the DrRacket editor, someone else can give 
you better pointers on that than I can.

-- 
http://www.neilvandyke.org/


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