Subject: Re: Brewing a new backend
From: Leonard Rosenthol (leonardr@lazerware.com)
Date: Tue Dec 26 2000 - 17:05:54 CST
At 8:50 AM +1100 12/27/00, Martin Sevior wrote:
>In addition to these improvements do you have ideas on how this code would
>help the following deficiencies in Abi. MS Word has these but our current
>formatting code cannot handle them at all.
Two of the three items you mentioned are EASY to handle with
our current architecture - or at least should be.
>1. Cannot place an image in the background of the document.
This should be easy enough to handle by simply having an
image blitted before drawing the text on top.
Of course, with our current "too many redraws" problem, that
would slow things down even more - but it's certainly doable.
>2. Placing an arbitary shaped object on a page and have the text flow
>around it.
This is also pretty easy to implement, ASSUMING you can live
with rectangular wrap for initial implementation. What you need to
do is create a higher level "layout" wrapper, if it doesn't already
exist, that tracks things outside of the actual page content -
headers, footers, footnotes, and now floating images. This wrapper
is then responsible for simply adjusting the margins of any
paragraphs that intersect with the images. In other words, you don't
need to change the underlying paragraph engine - just put some
framework on top.
>3. Tables.
Enough discussion on this one ;).
>For 2 and 3 we will require some new class in our piecetable. Currently
>the piecetable assumes that all content of the document flows sequently
>onto the page.
If that's the case, how do headers & footers work?
Leonard
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