OK, laddies, the task for today is to figure out how to show those pesky textedit fields. As you can see from the accompanying screen dump, I have seven textedit fields, and together they fill the screen; I have about 3.5 lines of text for each one. What to do?
One option is to go to smaller text, perhaps ten-point. That would allow me to fit four lines into each space, but no more. Of course, each line would be longer, but still I balk at this option.
Another option is to merge all the text files into a single one, but this creates additional problems. How can I enforce all the separation protocols in this case? What if the storybuilder deletes the field delimiters &emdash; how could I figure out a correction? It seems that I am asking too much here.
A third option is to install scrollbars on each text box. This option I find particularly repellant, because I hate the way scrollbars are implemented, with their damn set of special-case routines. It's bloody, bloody bad programming and I hate it. But there's another problem I have with these scroll bars: there's only about 24 pixels of space between the two arrows. That's barely enough for the thumb. This seems a complete waste. But it is the convention.
I could squeeze the display by a few pixels and get a bit more space, but the basic problem remains.
Another possibility, my favorite so far, is to use my homebrew numeric control buttons. They're tiny, to be sure, but I should be able to enlarge them by a few pixels.
How about some form of zoom or dialog box? You get to see the basic text, and you double-click on it and it zooms out to a larger box, or perhaps a dialog box, that is fully editable. Nah, you want to be able to compare the different POVs.
You know, the homebrew buttons will give a problem: they're set up for numeric control, not scrolling. I could end up fighting my own design here. They're ideal for their current application, and probably won't work well in a different situation.
Dammit, it looks like scrollbars.