scaleFactor: proving a point

[richmond62]

So, here I am, obviously a complete newbie at LiveCode after 22 years of working with it, as I learnt about scaleFactor yesterday.

Or maybe, just maybe, it proves something about several things:

1. The in-built documentation, while being reasonably good insofar as it documents a lot is pretty well useless for looking up ideas and concepts
unless one already knows the terms.

2.

our easy to understand programming language

While being, reasonably easy to understand, is not really quite as accessible as certain parties would have us think.

A search inwith the description of terms in the Documentation or somesuch would be a great improvement.

Deciding, 4 weeks ago, to find a way to make stacks look BIGGER on screen for a partially blind child was useless because
I, in my naivety, thought of the word 'magnify' which led me to something that is, as I have mentioned in another post,
NBG:
-
Mainly because this is untrue:

"Shows or hides a window showing a magnified view of an image."

What it does do is show a square palette containing a small bit of an image.

And that is not magnifying the whole stack, which scaleFactor does.

But how was simple-minded Richmond going to hit on 'that one'?

[jacque]

That's a universal problem with any dictionary for any language, including spoken languages. You have to know the word before you can find it. LC tries to help by putting a list of applicable terms in the handler sidebar in the script editor, and the "related" section in a dictionary entry is often helpful. But even those don't always help much.

I've been in the same quandary more once. It does help to read every new release notes so at least you know there's a keyword for something, even if you can't remember it later.

[FourthWorld]

Crowdsourced tagging would help.

[stam]

That's a universal problem with any dictionary for any language, including spoken languages.

This is all true - but for once this specific property is actually easy to notice, as it's on the stack property pane.
Big field that says 'ScaleFactor'

In general though, this is recurring issue and because because it's impossible to remember the entirety of the language and learn on all available commands, if they're even documented, so when I come across noteworthy commands/algorithms, I keep notes in the notes.app with a "LiveCode" tag, in a "coding" folder in the app - that way they're always instantly on Mac, browser, iOS. Works pretty well for me...

As for searching - the dictionary is not very good in that respect. I've talked about Dash.app many times, this is one of the reasons to use it... although it won't find synonyms (ie searching for 'magnification' won't show 'scaling') and not sure anything can, unless allocating synonymous tags which seems fairly unfeasible.

[richmond62]

Well , well trained AI should find synonyms.