Flattened Text

In plain text editors, there is a simple correlation between editor positions and characters. In a editor<%> object, this is not true much of the time, but it is still sometimes useful to just ``get the text'' of an editor.

There are two kinds of text available:

1. Simple text, where there is one character per item. Items which are characters are mapped to themselves, and all other items are mapped to a period. Line breaks are represented by carriage return characters (ASCII 13).
2. Flattened text, where each item can map to an arbitrary string. Items which are characters are still mapped to themselves, but more complicated items can be represented with a useful string, which is determined by the item's snip. Newlines are mapped to platform-specific character sequences (linefeed under X, carriage return under MacOS, and linefeed-carriage return under Windows). This is called ``flattened'' because the editor's items have been reduced to a linear sequence of characters.