set-face question

Just recently, I learned, through a little discussion on the REBOL facebook page, that it is inadvisable to set the text of a text face with a command like "face-name-1/text: text-name-1", but instead to use the set-face function. A few months ago I wrote myself a little demo of a demo program, where I display some instructions in a text area and page through pages of text with a "next" button. This text area also had a scroller next to it because sometimes the text was longer than the area I set up for it. The code to load the text area with the next page of text, reset the scroller, and display the new text, looked like this: LOAD-TEXT-AREA: func [PAGE] [ CURRENT-TEXT: copy "" CURRENT-TEXT: pick LESSON-TEXTS PAGE TEXT-AREA/text: CURRENT-TEXT TEXT-AREA/para/scroll/y: 0 TEXT-AREA/line-list: none TEXT-AREA/user-data: second size-text TEXT-AREA TEXT-SCROLLER/redrag TEXT-AREA/size/y / TEXT-AREA/user-data show TEXT-AREA ] This worked find initially, but as I paged through pages of text, and ran associated samples of code by means of another button, at some point the text on my buttons that I used to page through text would disappear. The buttons would work, but they would be blank. So, using my new-found knowledge, I changed the above procedure to look like this: LOAD-TEXT-AREA: func [PAGE] [ CURRENT-TEXT: copy "" CURRENT-TEXT: pick LESSON-TEXTS PAGE ;; TEXT-AREA/text: CURRENT-TEXT set-face TEXT-AREA CURRENT-TEXT TEXT-AREA/para/scroll/y: 0 TEXT-AREA/line-list: none TEXT-AREA/user-data: second size-text TEXT-AREA TEXT-SCROLLER/redrag TEXT-AREA/size/y / TEXT-AREA/user-data ;; show TEXT-AREA ] Notice that I now set the text with the set-face function, and I don't use the "show" function anymore. This also works fine, and I seem to be no longer having problems with the text on the buttons disappearing. So, the question is, if setting the text value of a face by means of the previous method is "face hacking" and not recommended, is there also a recommended procedure for setting those other attributes of the text area that seem to need setting for the scroller to work? The word TEXT-AREA is a 500x400 face of type "text" and TEXT-SCROLLER is a 16x400 scroller that I use to scroll the text withing TEXT-AREA. Those other attributes I am setting are items I located from a REBOL cookbook entry that explained how to use a scroller to move an area of text. I don't actually know what I am doing with them. I just examined the cookbook example until I thought I understood it, and then used that code whenever I want to scroll text. Or, am I actually doing things correctly, since they do work? Thank you.

You can examine any of the built in VID styles like this: ? svv/vid-styles/area You can see that the area style has an 'access object which contains these functions: set-face* get-face* clear-face* reset-face* There are no other access functions which do the things you want, so as far as I know given the example, you are setting values correctly. ** One of the things to watch for, which could be the cause of your problems, is that you should typically use a copy of strings and other series values when setting text: TEXT-AREA/text: copy CURRENT-TEXT Otherwise, you can end up with problems like this: view layout [ t: text-list f: field [append t/data f/text show t] ] In this case, do this: view layout [ t: text-list f: field [append t/data copy f/text show t] ]