The character ruler

The character ruler is located at the bottom of the editor. It aids in the creation of long strings for display on-screen. Due to the nature of the PRINT keyword, a string longer than 32 characters will "wrap" round to the beginning of the next line down. This can be useful for displaying many lines of text on one command. The character ruler will show you at a glance how long your string is, and a red marker will appear at any point where the 32 character boundary is reached. This activity will be activated whenever the cursor enters a quote delimited string area in the BASIC text.

To show or hide the character ruler, choose Character Ruler on the View menu.

Edit cursor position

Each mark on the ruler represents one character. Every eighth mark has a number that indicates the character count from the start of the program line. These numbers increase as you scroll to the right.

The black caret ( ) indicates the location of the edit cursor.

A grey vertical bar shows the horizontal position of the mouse pointer.

String lengths

The character ruler also indicates the lengths of string literals. (A string literal is a piece of program text enclosed in quotation marks, such as "Welcome".)

While the edit cursor is inside a string literal, the character ruler displays the length of that string in green, with a red caret after every 32nd character. The Spectrum screen display is 32 characters wide, so this indicates where a line of text will wrap.

See also the section on the editor context menu for information on wrapping long strings around the screen with word-wrap and other effects.