MicroWorlds EX™ Lessons

Lesson Eight: Text Boxes, Print and Announce Commands

There are a couple different ways to handle text using MicroWorldsEX: The Announce command and the use of the print command pr [ ] in a text box.

Option 1: The Announce command

With the Announce command, all you need to do is to type your exact message within brackets right after typing the word announce.

• For example, typing: announce [Hellooooo, everybody] will cause a grey dialog box to pop up that says "Announce" at the top of it and then has a little yellow alert triangle followed by your exact message: Hellooooo, everybody -- including the punctuation and spelling errors. You cannot change the size or color and every other bit of your procedure will be on hold until the user hits the Ok button that shows up.

Option 2: The print command pr [ ]

In order to use the print command, you will first need to create a textbox. You can do this with the mouse ahead of time. Click on the textbox icon on the top grey bar. Then use your mouse to click and drag from one corner of your new textbox to the opposite corner. If you need to resize the textbox, just go back to the Arrow cursor , and click and drag from outside the textbox to the interior. This should highlight the textbox itself with little dark squares on the corners for dragging around to adjust the desired size. If you highlight the text inside the box, you can then pull down Text from the top menu and adjust font, font size, style or color.

To clear the text from a textbox, just type in ct for clear text. When you want the text to appear again, just type pr [ your text goes here ] and the text will appear with the new color and size you selected a minute ago. It is best to avoid scroll bars, so you may need to make your text box larger to accomodate the new text without needing to scroll down to see it all. (See the tip in lesson nine about using Duplicate Pages if your textbox is so big that it overshadows your nice background. Making it temporary by jumping back and forth to a different page is often a good thing.)

Another way to make this happen on small textboxes is to use a series of commands to clear the text, wait a short while, show the text, wait a short while for the reader to get the message, then clear the text again and go on with a second or third message that will appear in the exact same spot:

ct wait 20 pr [ first message goes here ] wait 30 ct wait 10 pr [second message goes here] wait 25 ct

Lesson Nine: Creating New Pages & Tying Them All Together

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