SimpleText

SimpleText

SimpleText under the German version of Mac OS 8
Developer(s)	Apple Computer, now Apple Inc.
Stable release	1.4
Operating system	System 7.x-Mac OS 9
Type	Text editor
License	Proprietary

SimpleText is the native text editor for the Classic Mac OS. SimpleText allows editing including text formatting (underline, italic, bold, etc.), fonts, and sizes. It can be considered similar to Windows' WordPad application. In later versions it also gained additional read only display capabilities for PICT files, as well as other Mac OS built-in formats like Quickdraw GX and QTIF, 3DMF and even QuickTime movies. SimpleText can even record short sound samples and, using Apple's PlainTalk speech system, read out text in English.

SimpleText evolved from TeachText which was used to distribute Readme documents, which was derived from the Edit application, a simple editing application distributed with the earliest of Macintoshes to demonstrate the use of the Macintosh interface and the TextEdit application programming interface in the classic Mac OS. The key improvement between the two versions was the addition of text styling, while TeachText supported only a single font per document. Like TeachText, SimpleText was also limited to only 32 kB of text in a document, although images could increase the file size beyond this limit.

In Mac OS X, SimpleText is replaced by the more powerful TextEdit, which reads and writes more document formats. Mac OS X also includes common Unix-like text editors, such as vim and pico.

Apple has released the source code for a Carbon version of SimpleText in the Panther (10.3) Developer Tools. If the Developer Tools are installed, it can be found at /Developer/Examples/Carbon/SimpleText.

See also

• List of text editors
• Comparison of text editors

External links

• Apple Developer Connection: The Complete Guide to SimpleText