Style Eyes is, as stated above, a styled text editor. It’s not exactly a word processor, because although it supports styled text, it has no text formatting features (like centered text, tabs, etc).
What’s it for, then? Style Eyes has two main features: style-based search and replace, and easy creation of TeachText-compatible “ReadMe” files (like this one), complete with pictures.
Styled Search-and-Replace
This is the Find window:
Notice the Match checkboxes— Font, Size and Style in addition to the usual Case. You will also notice that the Font, Size, and Style menus are still active when this window is in front. You can set the text style of the Find and Replace fields (the whole fields, not individual characters, unlike in the document window).
If you use the Find command with the Font box checked, only text matching the font in the Find field will be found. The same goes for Size and Style; you can also use any combination of the three.
If you use the Change command with the Font box checked, the selected text in the document is replaced with the text in the Replace field, using the field’s font but leaving the size and style the same. As with the Find command, any combination of font, size, or style may be used. This is not true for the Case button; the case of the text in the Replace field is always used.
The rest of the buttons, I hope, are self-explanatory.
Things change a little when there is no text in the Find and/or Replace fields. First, if Font, Size or Style is checked, then the current font name is displayed in place of the text field, using the current size and style. A search with no Find text will find any text as long as its style matches. A replace with no Change text will only change the style of the selected text. Using combinations of these features with the Change All button, you can, for example, italicize every occurrence of the word “groceries” in a file.
Using Pictures
As you can see above, Style Eyes can display pictures in its documents, and it does this the same way TeachText and SimpleText do. The way it works is that every picture is attatched to a “hard space” (option-spacebar). The pictures are stored as PICT resources in the file (usually with ResEdit), with ID numbers starting at 1000. If a hard space in the text has no picture attatched, then the corresponding ID number is skipped.
The problem with TeachText and SimpleText here is that they don’t let you paste in the pictures—you have to use ResEdit, and figure out the ID numbers of the PICT resources yourself. Style Eyes, on the other hand, lets you cut, copy, and paste pictures just like you do in other programs, so if you didn’t follow what I just explained it doesn’t matter anymore :-).
When you paste in a picture, Style Eyes also automatically inserts a couple of blank lines (in 12-point Geneva, so that it looks right in TeachText) so that the following text doesn’t get drawn on top of the picture. You can of course delete them if you like. Pictures are always drawn centered horizontally in the window, with their tops at the top of the line where their hard space is. To delete a picture, just delete its hard space.
In order to cut or copy a picture, you must select its hard space and hold down the option key as you select Cut or Copy from the Edit menu; these commands will change to Cut Picture and Copy Picture.
Note: Deleting or cutting a picture cannot be undone; Style Eyes will always ask you to confirm these actions.
Another Note: Pictures that overlap page breaks will get cut off when printing. Sorry.
Yet Another Note: Printing from the Finder is not yet supported. You must use the Print command from within Style Eyes.
Lots of File Types
When saving a file, you will notice four little radio buttons in the Save As dialog. These represent the different file types you can choose from: Style Eyes, Style Eyes stationery, SimpleText, and SimpleText read-only (the newspaper icon).
File Compatibility
If you open a Style Eyes file with TeachText, you will still see the pictures, but everything will be displayed in Geneva 12. If you use SimpleText, you will also see the styles. This works the other way around as well—Style Eyes will read styles and pictures stored in TeachText and SimpleText documents. This is because Style Eyes and SimpleText use identical file formats, and a SimpleText file is just a TeachText file with the additional style information. (Try opening this file with SimpleText. It looks exactly the same.)
Other Little Things
You can also use the Option, Command, and Shift keys together with the arrow keys in the standard way. Shift extends the selection; Option goes by words or paragraphs; Command goes to the beginning or end of the line or document. Style Eyes also scrolls faster with pictures than SimpleText, and it doesn’t have the SimpleText bug where certain pictures don’t center correctly. I’ve thrown in lots of little hacks in an effort to make sure text editing behaves just right. I’m getting there.
What a Wonderful Tool!
By now you may be wondering what you need TeachText or SimpleText for now that you have Style Eyes. Amazingly enough, there are a couple of reasons. Unlike Style Eyes, both TeachText and SimpleText can open PICT files. SimpleText in addition can open QuickTime movies, record sounds annotations for text files, open QuickDraw GX PDD files and print job files, and a few other things. It also does drag-and-drop editing with Macintosh Drag and Drop (but that’s on the list of future Style Eyes features; see below). So you just might want to keep it around.
Future Plans
• Drag and drop- As mentioned above, but unlike SimpleText, Style Eyes would allow you to drag and drop pictures!
• XTND Support- When I figure out how, I may give Style Eyes the ability to read lots of different file formats using the XTND system.
• Scriptability (is that really a word?)- It would also be a good idea to support the standard text suite of Apple Events so that Style Eyes can be manipulated through AppleScript (or other scripting languages).
• Preferences- One of those dialogs where you set things like what sizes you want in your Size menu, default font, and other stuff.
• Search Macros- Maintain a list of Find window settings for future reference.
• Et Cetera- It’s the little things that make life wonderful.
Guarantee
None whatsoever. Use at your own risk. Hopefully there won’t be much risk, but you never know…
Other General Notes
This program is free. You may distribute it at will (or Alan, or whoever…), as long as you don’t change anything. Not that you’d want to, really.
Style Eyes is my first Mac application (and it’s about time). I still have many ideas and plans for this program (see above), and I would welcome any comments and suggestions (and bug reports!). I may be reached at the following addresses:
