Re: Word scripting?
Re: Word scripting?
- Subject: Re: Word scripting?
- From: Paul Berkowitz <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 24 Mar 2003 16:13:32 -0800
On 3/24/03 3:24 PM, "Shane Stanley" <email@hidden> wrote:
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On 25/3/03 9:13 AM +1000, Paul Berkowitz, email@hidden, wrote:
>
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> My impression is that trying to squeeze Word's object model into the basic
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> Standard and Text Suites is a hopeless task
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>
>
But they've already done it! Back in Word 6 or Word 98, or whatever. The
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object model has been designed, and fairly well. The _only_ problem is that
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it just doesn't work. It's completely misleading.
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>
> and that to implement scripting properly for Word would require a more direct
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> match from its actual object model to commands in its scripting suite.
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>
>
You're joking, right? Open the existing dictionary, imagine that the
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commands that are there work, and tell me what prevents basic text-editing
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procedures.
Anybody can imagine anything. What's that got to do with it? I'm not a C++
developer, or whatever it is they program Word in. I haven't a clue what it
is that's going wrong under the surface, and I'd be very surprised if you
did either. The main reason for having Word, rather than another word
processor, on the Mac, is its interoperability with Word Windows. So you can
exchange documents back and forth, edit them, send them back, etc. aside
from its power, that is. So when they change the code, things break. Word is
_extremely_ complex. Its documents are coded as binary files, not text
files. I'm sure that the conversion to something that can respond to the
Text Suite is not child's play. There's lots of programming code that they
have to port from the Windows version as changes are made there, which
probably muddled all the little gimmicks they put into Word 4 and 5 (which
is when AppleScript worked - it went bad in Word 6, not in Word 2001) to fit
with the AppleScript Text Suite.
>
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Again: it doesn't work because someone couldn't be bothered making it work.
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All the talk of invisible characters and matching object models is at best a
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distraction.
No it isn't. All your talk is hot air, because, like me, you have no idea
how much labour would be involved. The Mac Business Unit is pretty small,
you know. When MS designed VBA for Office Windows, they probably had teams
of 15 working on the VBA for each of Word, Excel, PPT. They don't have
anywhere near that many developers for all of the 3 apps combined, let alone
just for AppleScript. Nevertheless, I believe that they do understand that
AppleScript is important on the Mac, and that they're doing something about
it for future releases. There's no point bandying slogans about now. We'll
have to wait and see what happens.
--
Paul Berkowitz
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