 SimpleText under the German version ofMac OS 8 | |
| Developer(s) | Apple Computer |
|---|---|
| Stable release | 1.4 |
| Operating system | System 7 –Mac OS 9 |
| Type | Text editor |
| License | Proprietary |
SimpleText is thenativetext editor for the Appleclassic Mac OS.[1] SimpleText allows text editing and text formatting (underline, italic, bold, etc.), fonts, and sizes. It was developed to integrate the features included in the different versions ofTeachText that were created by various software development groups withinApple Computer.[2]
It can be considered similar to Windows'WordPad application. In later versions it also gained additional read only display capabilities forPICT files, as well as other Mac OS built-in formats like Quickdraw GX andQTIF,3DMF and evenQuickTime movies.[2] SimpleText can even record short sound samples and, using Apple'sPlainTalk speech system, read out text in English. Users who wanted to add sounds longer than 24 seconds, however, needed to use a separate program to create the sound and then paste the desired sound into the document usingResEdit.[2]
SimpleText supersededTeachText, which was included in System Software up until it was replaced in 1994 (shipped with System Update 3.0 and System 7.1.2). The need for TeachText arose after Apple stopped bundlingMacWrite, to ensure that every user could open and readReadme documents.
The key improvement of SimpleText over TeachText was the addition of text styling. Theunderlying OS required by SimpleText implemented a standardstyled text format, which meant that SimpleText could support multiple fonts and font sizes. Prior Macintosh OS versions lacked this feature, so TeachText supported only a single font per document. Adding text styling features made SimpleText WorldScript-savvy, meaning that it can use Simplified and Traditional Chinese characters.[3] Like TeachText, SimpleText was also limited to only 32 kB of text in a document,[2] although images could increase the total file size beyond this limit. SimpleText style information was stored in the file'sresource fork in such a way that if the resource fork was stripped (such as by uploading to a non-Macintosh server), the text information would be retained.
InMac OS X, SimpleText is replaced by the more powerfulTextEdit application, which reads and writes more document formats as well as includingword processor-like features such as aruler andspell checking. TextEdit's styled text format isRTF, which is able to survive a single-forked file system intact.
Apple has released the source code for aCarbon version of SimpleText in theMac OS X Panther (10.3) Developer Tools. If the 10.3 Developer Tools are installed, it can be found at/Developer/Examples/Carbon/SimpleText. Alternatively, the sample code can be found in Apple'sDocumentation Archive:SimpleText Sample.
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