Beautiful Code [325]
The amount of text moved by the text up/down commands depends on the marker selected by the user, which can be character, word, punctuation mark, sentence, or paragraph. The scroll marker currently selected is shown on the screen below the tree. Commands are also available to move the entire contents of the text boxes from one to the other.
In order to be able to scroll a small amount during typing, Words Down and Words Up options are available using the long click. When one of these is selected, words scroll in the selected direction until the right mouse button is clicked again. Note that combinations of punctuation characters are treated as words, too. This allows the user to make quick corrections in the immediate vicinity of the point of insertion or deletion of text, to rapidly scroll a bit while typing.
30.2.11. The Clipboard
When the user selects Cut or Copy in the Edit subtree, SaveReverse is invoked to prepend the contents of the middle box to the file clipboard.txt, keeping a total of 20 paragraphs. The advantage of this approach is that it allows paragraphs to be easily rearranged, and older cuts to be pasted again and again. In most text editors, each time Cut or Copy is selected, the previous contents of the clipboard are lost. In eLocutor, older clipboard information hangs around for a while.
30.2.12. Searching
No self-respecting editor can lack a search function, but eLocutor allowed us to look at this basic function afresh. We realized that searching is indeed just a special case of scrolling, so we merely extended our scroll implementation. The user can copy text from the middle box into the filter buffer, or select Set Filter with the desired text highlighted in the tree via a long click. When text is present in the filter, and a scroll command is given, scrolling does not stop until the contents of the filter are also found in the middle box, or the end of text reached.
30.2.13. Macros
An interesting point came up in one of our discussions with Professor Hawking's office. They told me he sometimes had problems with Equalizer when delivering a speech, if the lighting made it hard for him to read the screen. Without being able to read the screen, he found it hard to alternately scroll the text, then issue a speak command.
In eLocutor, it already was possible to put the entire text of the speech in the middle box and issue a command to the software to say it, but that was insufficient. People might clap or laugh in the middle, so he needed to be able to wait for them to subside before continuing to deliver the lecture.
It would not have been hard to build in a function to scroll and speak a sentence each time the user selected a particular menu item, but rather than hardcode this, we thought it would be better to address this problem at a more general level, by providing a macro function that would allow other such combinations to be made in the future.
In the Commands subtree is a node called Macros, under which all files in the subdirectory C:\eLocutor\macros are listed. If any of these is selected, the file is opened, and the commands listed in it are executed one by one. No complexities are possible in macro design: no jumps, loops, or branching.
For speech delivery, we created two short macros, preparespeech and scrollspeak. preparespeech opens both gates if they aren't already, and pushes the entire text into the lower box. Having executed this macro, the user then selects Pause via a long click when scrollspeak is highlighted. All this could be done in advance.
Once on stage, the user does not need to look at the screen. Each time he now clicks, he executes scrollclick, so that effectively two commands are executed. First is a Text Up command, which sends as much text as decided by