What do Stamps do

@ellen asked, nested in a separate thread:

I want to find out what people said about about Stamps since the manual makes no sense to me. The online reference writes about a logical set of pets: guinea pigs, cats and dogs as types of pets. Past that, I got lost. Unfortunately, I have no framework for understanding the relevance of the logical example.

I think the reference is to this aTbRef article on the Stamps tab of the Document Inspector.

Stamps are simply self-contained actions. At it’s simplest it might set a colour using stamp code like this:

$Color="bright blue";

You can do multiple such actions in one stamp. IF we realise we want to reset the colour of some notes because we’re now going to use a prototype to set their colour we might make a stamp:

$Color=; $Prototype="blue_notes";

Don’t get too hung up on what exactly the code above does. I’m just showing that you can alter one or more than one attribute when applying a stamp. The stamp, when used, runs its code discretely on each of the currently selected items - i.e. you can stamp a single item or select several and apply the same stamp to them all at once.

Don’t worry about more complex code examples (as in the lined article above). At simplest, stamps are manually invoked action code. They are called via the Stamps inspector or the Stamps menu.

If you don’t quite understand actions yet, I’d read upon (or ask about!) those - in a separate thread - before using stamps so that you understand the effect your stamps will have.

The same action code can likely be used as a rule, edict, agent action, an OnAdd action or a Stamp. The unique aspect of a stamp is you manually set both the scope (selected items), periodicity (run once only per application) and the timing (when the stamp is applied).

This is pretty straightforward. Thank-you. I guess I should have look at the outline of the reference and seeing that Stamps is a subtitle of Actions, I needed to read actions. Although I must say, it flies over my head. I at least understand that a stamp is a kind of action.