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Catherine J Saxton

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Thomas W Saxton

Property modifiers stored on a computer-readable medium for formatting information associated with a computer file, such as an electronic document. Each property modifier includes a size field having information indicating the size of its property modifier argument and an index field having an index into a property information array. A program module can traverse a group of property modifiers by utilizing the information in the size field of the current property modifier to determine the location of the next property modifier. Formatting is applied to information of the computer file by using the index of each property modifier to access formatting information maintained in the property information array. Each property modifier can store encoded information corresponding to the type of object to receive formatting, the size of the property modifier's argument, and an index into the property information array associated with an executable computer program. Rather than pre-allocate space in the executable portion of a program module, the property modifier itself contains information embedded therein that indicates the size of the parameter of the property modifier.

Data formating property modifiers

Formatting information in a program module, particularly useful for word processing and similar text processing programs. A property information array stored in association with an executable program module contains formatting for applying to information in a document comprising a data structure and a property modifier structure. The data structure stores data elements corresponding to the information in the document to be formatted, e.g., a text file. The property modifier structure stores groups of data formatting property modifiers and their arguments that represent the appearance of the data elements, e.g., a character property, a paragraph property, a section property, etc. Each property modifier contains encoded format-related information and comprises an argument size field having information indicating the size of the property modifier argument and a unique identification field, i.e., an index into the property information array. A selected data element may be displayed, printed, etc. in accordance with the formatting information by accessing the property information array with the index of the property modifier associated with the selected data element. The property modifier argument size allows the program module to skip property modifiers that it does not understand or handle, by using the argument size information to move ahead in the group of data formatting property modifiers to the next property modifier.

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