Inside Macintosh: AppleScript Language Guide / Part 3 - Appendixes

Appendix B - Scriptable Text Editor Dictionary / Scriptable Text Editor Object Class Definitions

Text Item

Objects of class Text Item are delimited by any of the characters specified by the Scriptable Text Editor's Text Item Delimiters property or by the beginning or end of a container. You can modify the Text Item Delimiters property, but such changes are lost when the user quits the application.

PROPERTIES

Font

The name of the font of the text item. If the font varies
within the text item, the Font property specifies the font
of the first character.
Class: String
Modifiable? Yes

Length

The number of characters in a text object.
Class: Integer
Modifiable? No

Offset

The offset, in characters, from the beginning of the document to the first character of a text object.
Class: Integer
Modifiable? No

Size

The size, in points, of the text item. If the size varies within the text item, the Size property specifies the size of the first character.
Class: Integer
Modifiable? Yes

Style

The text styles of a text object. If the text styles vary within
the text item, the Style property specifies the styles of the
first character.
Class: Text Style Info. Objects of this class have two properties: On Styles and Off Styles. The On Styles property specifies the styles that apply to the text object. The Off Styles property specifies the styles that do not apply to the text object. Both properties are lists of constants that specify text styles. See "Elements of Text Objects" on page 314 for information
about how styles are used. The constants that can be used in Style property lists are bold, italic, outline, underline, and shadow.
Modifiable? Yes

Uniform Styles
The text styles that are uniformly "on" or "off" for all characters of a text object.
Class: Text Style Info. Objects of this class have two properties: On Styles and Off Styles. The On Styles property specifies the styles that apply to all the characters of the text object. The Off Styles property specifies the styles that do not apply to any of the characters of the text object. Both properties are lists of constants that specify text styles. If a style does not appear in either list, the style applies to some but not all of the characters in the object. See "Elements of Text Objects" on page 314 for information about how styles are used. The constants that can be used in Uniform Styles property lists are bold, italic, outline, underline, and shadow.
Modifiable? No

ELEMENT CLASSES

See "Elements of Text Objects" on page 314 for a general discussion of these element classes.

Character

Characters contained in the text items

Paragraph

Paragraphs contained in the text items

Text

Series of characters contained in the text items

Text Item

Text items contained in the text items

Word

Words contained in the text items

COMMANDS HANDLED

Copy, Count, Cut, Data Size, Delete, Duplicate, Exists, Get, Make, Move,
Select, Set

DEFAULT VALUE CLASS RETURNED

Styled Text

EXAMPLE

tell document "Report" of app "Scriptable Text Editor"   copy text item 2 to x
end tell

In this example, if the document Report begins with "Tomato, Banana, Pineapple", then the value of x is "Banana".

NOTE

The characters used to separate text item objects are specified in the Scriptable Text Editor's Text Item Delimiters property. At startup the default value of the Scriptable Text Editor's Text Item Delimiters property is a single-item list that contains a comma: {","}. You can set this delimiter to a different value or add additional delimiters, but the new values are lost when the user quits the application.