TabRuler: a fantastically useful plugin...
by Sarah Reichelt
I know that my next article was supposed to be a round-up of useful web sites, but in the meantime, I found this terrific plugin that I just had to share with you all.
The name of Frederic Rinaldi is familiar to all of us who have migrated to Revolution from HyperCard. He has produced a large number of quality externals for HyperCard and SuperCard over many years and he has now converted to Revolution, declaring it to be "FINALLY the right HyperCard successor!"
While he has written many externals as well as some new add-ons for Revolution, today I want to concentrate on one in particular: TabRuler, currently in version 1.2 and written entirely in Transcript. If (like me) you have tried to do any formatting on tab-delimited fields in Revolution, you will know that setting and especially editing tab stops is a tedious business. This is because Revolution specifies tab stops in pixels from the left of the field. This means that if you want to set up a field with tab widths of 50, 100, and 50, you have to set the tabStops to 50,100,150. This is easy enough, but what if you later decide that the first column needs to be 60 pixels wide? You have to add 10 to each of the numbers in the tabStops, giving you 60,110,160. If you have a field with a large number of tab stops, this rapidly becomes unfunny.
Frederic Rinaldi has provided a plugin that gives us a graphical interface for setting and editing tab stops in a completely intuitive manner. Go to http://www.xcmdfactory.com/ and click on the "Revolution Stuff" button in the column on the left. In the plugins section of his Revolution page, you will see "TabRuler." Click on the disk icon to download the zip file.
Quit Revolution if it is running. Find the application folder and in it you will see a plugins folder. Put the unzipped file "TabRuler 1.2.rev" into the plugins folder (version 1.2 was current as of this writing). Now restart Revolution.
Go to the Development menu -> Plugins where you should now see revTabRuler. Select this menu item to make the plugin active. Now whenever you create or select a field, the tab ruler will appear at the top.
TabRuler is very simple with only a few options. In it's most basic form, you click to set a tab stop, and drag to move one. As is normal in Revolution, tab stop widths that are not specified take their setting from the last width that was set, i.e., if you just set a single tab width of 75 pixels, all subsequent tab stops are also 75 pixels.
The TabRuler contains two popup menus. The "Grid" menu allows you to set a snap value. None allows you to specify any pixel value for a tab stop. A setting of 10 means that all tab stops are snapped to the nearest 10 pixels.
The other popup is the "Edit" menu. This allows you to copy a set of tabs and then paste them to another field, and to delete all tab stops or undo all recent changes. Changes to a field's tab stops are not finalised until you deselect the field, and unless you have "Auto" checked, the plugin will ask you to confirm that the new settings are what you really want.
Click the "?" for some information, or the "+" to close the plugin. It can be reopened at any time from the plugin menu.
The only criticism I would have of this plugin is the way if interferes with setting the vertical grid for a field. When the plugin is active, it temporarily sets the vertical grid on. When you deselect the field, the vertical grid is turned off again. This means that if you really want to turn on the vertical grid, you have to close TabRuler, turn on the vertical grid in the Inspector, then start up TabRuler again. If the vertical grid is already on when it is activated, TabRuler remembers this and leaves it on after the field is deselected.
Overall, a great product at a great price (free) - so get it today!
Until next time,
Sarah
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