Bibliographic Details
| Title: |
CONCEPTS OF THE TEXT EDITOR LARA. |
| Authors: |
Gutknecht, J.1, Sibley, Edgar H. |
| Source: |
Communications of the ACM. Sep85, Vol. 28 Issue 9, p942-960. 19p. 18 Diagrams, 7 Charts. |
| Subjects: |
Text editors (Computer programs), Microcomputer workstations (Computers), Computer software, Systems software, Editing software, Computer systems |
| Abstract: |
The article presents a discussion on the concepts of the text editor Lara. Lara, a text editor developed for the Lilith workstation, exemplifies the principles underlying modern text-editor design: a high degree of interactivity, an internal data structure that mirrors currently displayed text, and extensive use of bitmap controlled displays and facilities. Lara documents are self-contained in the sense that they do not depend on a style file. Instead of applying style elements, Lara introduces a new method of formatting text that consists of copying attributes from one place on the display to another, be it in the same document or another. Sample documents can be created to achieve format consistency within a group of documents. Furthermore, by restricting the tree structure of a document to four universal levels that are each associated with a distinct set of formatting attributes, Lara provides a close connection between displayed text and internal data structure. This means that the internal data structure is completely determined by the currently displayed text: It is not explicitly dependent on the history of the editing process. |
| Database: |
Engineering Source |
