So you want to play with the effects attribute of a face, but find it difficult to get the right look? You may want to speed up the feedback between writing the code and looking at the actual results. There's nothing like near real time feedback from the code you are currently writing, as it can shave many seconds and trivial debugging off your code refinement cycle. Seconds become quickly become hours, if you refine your code a hundred times, before you are happy.

Therefore I usually build a small helper tool to make things more interactive when doing REBOL graphics. These tools are purposely kept really simple, usually around 10 lines of code. You don't need more than that.

For processing the effect attribute, you could build a small tool that presents a face of a comfortable size to view your effect in and a text area for you to write code in:

The code is almost as simple:

view layout [

  space 2 across origin 4

  ef-box: box 300x300 with [color: none] edge [size: 1x1]

  ef-text: area 500x300 font [name: "courier"] [

    if attempt [load face/text] [

      ef-box/effect: load face/text

      show ef-box

    ]

  ]

]

You can now type in your effects code and the face in the left side will update, when you unfocus the text area.

When you are happy with the effect code, you can copy the code and paste it inside your source code. Quick and simple.