This week’s script is another real-world example that was requested by a client. When inserting an image into an EDGAR HTML file, the image has to be in the same folder as the HTML. This script adds a menu command that allows an image to be inserted and copied to the same folder in one step. To do this, we use a lot of SDK functions we’ve discussed in earlier blog posts, however, in this post we also discuss inserting text at the current cursor position.

Way back in Legato Developers Corner #6, we used the WordParse function to pull apart simple strings, and parse through some simple HTML data. While WordParse is a great tool for doing simple things like that, what happens if you want to parse through an entire file, and extract information from it? To do that, you’ll need to use a more powerful SGML parser. This blog post is intended to be an introduction to our SGML parsing and support object using a real-world example.

One of the most obvious statements you can make is you cannot open or modify a file if you cannot get it’s location. If the location of a file cannot be defined, then you can’t do anything to it. Legato provides several very useful functions to break down a file path, add paths together, and just generally improve how you deal with paths.

Whenever you are writing a script, getting information to and from users is always a very important (and often complicated) part. There needs to be a way to notify the user that something has happened or to ask a user a simple question. Legato provides a basic interface for performing these tasks using message boxes.

Legato has several functions to help manage displaying and tracking time. It might be very useful to know, for example, how long has it been since the last action was performed. Say you want to run a task every five minutes. Well, you need some way to check to see if five minutes has elapsed or not. Additionally, if you want to display time to a user, you need to make sure that the time is displayed in an intelligible format, not just a number of milliseconds seconds since 1970 or something equally useless to anyone except a machine. This article will discuss a few of the functions that simplify this.