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Why doesn't hot text work when the user clicks it?

If your hot text highlights when you click it, but the event you've specified doesn't happen, the most likely cause is a typo in the event specification.

If the hot text doesn't highlight when you click it:

• Did you place the <hot text> command immediately before the paragraph in which the text appears? The command will not work if there's more than one carriage return between it and the hot text; for example, you can't group all your <hot text> commands at the beginning of a multi-paragraph panel.

• Did you designate the correct occurrence of the hot phrase in your <hot text> command? If you use FIRST as the second parameter of the command, and the phrase occurs earlier in the paragraph, this earlier occurrence will be the one that's hot. For example, in the panel

  <define panel> "My Panel"
 <format> "Full"
 <hot text> "script", FIRST, LaunchNewSequenceNewWindow("script definition")
  The AppleScript language is used to control Macintosh computers. To use AppleScript, you write a small computer program, called a script.
   <panel prompt> "Standard"
<end panel>

  you intend the word "script", which is the last word of the panel, to be clickable. However, the string "script" appears earlier in this panel, in the word "AppleScript". The above panel, when compiled, will do nothing when the user clicks the word "script", but when the user clicks the second half of the word "AppleScript", the script definition sequence will appear. Possible workarounds include using LAST instead of FIRST, or including surrounding punctuation in the hot phrase (in this case, you could include the period, designating "script." as your hot text).

• Does your hot text wrap from one line to the next? Apple Guide designates a rectangle for hot text, not a region; this limitation means that if there's a line break in the middle of a multi-word hot phrase, only the part on the first line will be hot. There is no clean workaround for this problem; the best solution is to place a hard return before the first word of the phrase so that it will all be on a single line. (Remember to move the <hot text> command so it's immediately before the hard return.)

Jeanne A. E. DeVoto jaed@jaedworks.com
Copyright © 1996 Jeanne A. E. DeVoto