I just had to force quit Pan X because I generated a message that was too big for my screen, so I could not close it with a button.
You can press the Return or Enter key even if the Ok button isn’t visible.
There was an extensive discussion of this, on the Panorama issue tracker nearly a year ago:
The bottom line is that this can only be fixed by Apple, and it is in their system as a bug (I’m not holding my breath). The message statement is for displaying small amounts of text. If you have a lot of text to display, you should use superalert or displaydata, which give you precise control over the dimensions, and also allow scrolling.
I am pretty sure that I pressed both return and enter, and nothing happened.
Would it be possible to include code to truncate or summarize a message down to a limited number of characters?
I have always been able to dismiss the over extended Message with the Return, Enter or Space Bar.
Regarding your idea to limit the Message contents to a restricted number of characters, here is what Jim posted in reply to a similar suggestion I made on the subject in the Bitbucket discussion forum:
Panorama uses the operating system native alerts. In Carbon
(Panorama 6), the alert is controlled by a template in a resource, you
specify the size. So Panorama had multiple types of alerts for different
sizes – message, tallmessage, giantmessage, etc. All of these were limited to 255 characters (a leftover from the original Mac ROMs using Pascal255 strings).
In Cocoa (Panorama X) there is no template – the alert resizes based
on the text supplied, which also is not limited to 255 characters. So
in Panorama X, all of the message statement – message, tallmessage, giantmessage, etc. are all the same statement. No difference.
I can’t really fix the bug unless I take away the ability to invoke a
native alert – in other words I would have to create a simulated alert
instead of a native alert. I think that is a bad idea, and Panorama
already has simulated alerts (superalert, displaydata, etc.) You should
be able to invoke a native Cocoa alert. I also don’t like the idea of
slapping an arbitrary limit on the text length either. What would that
limit be? The shortest reasonable limit would be 255 characters, but
that wouldn’t solve the problem. If the text contained carriage returns
it could still easily expand the alert past the screen height. Plus then
I’ll get bug reports from people with 27" iMacs complaining that the
text got cut off. I did get that sort of bug report for the old message statement.
My stance is going to be that if you’re using a message statement for arbitrarily long text, you’re doing it wrong. That’s not what a message statement is for. Actually, I’d say that is Apple’s stance, and I’m passing it along to you.