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C'mon people, even the free yahoo mail offers such option, when composing emails. I wanted to color some parts of a text, and I had to use Microsoft Word for that.
Obviously I'm not referring to syntax highlighting, but wait a sec! even this html form offers a 'font colour' option!

Great tool anyway...

Textpad is - as the name suggests - a text editor.
Simple plain text.

If you want to have formatting (like colors), use a different tool - textpad is for plain text only.

Of course we want to use plain text!!! Who says to change that?
Think about it: formatting would be nice, but we don't wanna change the format of the text, so it remains plain, not turn it into some ugly binary file.

Also colors aren't an alien idea for TP: syntax highlighting is nice, isn't it?

So why not combine the two 'worlds'? The formatting details could be saved in the tws file for example.

In conclusion think twice before votting!

One word: Yes.

This brings up some really difficult issues.

If you save formatting in TWS files, then all changes are lost unless you open up the file ONLY via that TWS, right. So can you have two TWSs with a different coloring scheme for the same file? TWSs are meant to change--as far as I use them, meaning that storing persistent information in a non-persistent thing won't work.

If not storing it in a TWS, then where do you store it? You certainly can't MSDOCify ASCII documents, and don't even think about creating an individual "metadata" file for each text document. :' )

Could you clarify what you really want, and how you think it could be done without compromising what TextPad is meant to be...?

Just check the bevavior of the Yahoo Messenger: you send messages you can format (bold, italic, underline and colors), but in the Message Archive (you should enable the option first) the text appears unformatted! So the formatting is just a 'view' you create when you want to.

I think the formatting details should be kept in the tws file, as they represent some information you chose to have in a peticular file in order to help you. Of course you might have different coloring schemes for the same file, but in different workspaces!

How about re-phrasing the request to one for "highlighting selected text"? Some editors (eg ACEHTML) store the highlight in the equivalent of our TWS file (and even offer a variety of colours to use concurrently).

And thinking of this feature as a highlight, it makes sense that it should not persist from one TWS to another. Each TWS is after all a different "point of view", and one might expect different text to be highlighted from different points of view.

I don't think we should put syntax highlighting in the TWS - nor the extended formatting mentioned in other requests .. they should remain in the SYN files.

trids wrote: Each TWS is after all a different "point of view", and one might expect different text to be highlighted from different points of view.

I don't think we should put syntax highlighting in the TWS - nor the extended formatting mentioned in other requests .. they should remain in the SYN files.

Totally agree with what u said above.

MudGuard wrote:Textpad is - as the name suggests - a text editor.
Simple plain text.

If you want to have formatting (like colors), use a different tool - textpad is for plain text only.

You're technically right, but you might consider that Textpad is way more than just a text editor. It works as a syntax editor and has incredibly robust features that make it desireable as an editor for practically everything.

I guess I look at it this way: it wouldn't be terribly difficult to enable file formatting as toggleable option and the formatting itself could be stored in a separate file. That way you have your unformatted untagged plain text regardless of having the option on. For those of us who COULD benefit from coloring blocks of text or using coloring that goes beyond the scope of a syntax definition, it would retain the current functionality while offering the feature we want.

I think it's a little silly to think of Textpad as notepad on steriods...it's a great app that can accomplish so much, and there are always solutions that can get us from point A to point B without causing total annihilation and carnage. :)