Subject: RE: Fields -- are we ready to tackle them now?
From: Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Date: Fri Feb 11 2000 - 21:47:47 CST
At 12:31 PM 2/11/00 +0100, Henrik Berg wrote:
>Half way thru I had a clear picture of this fact. To my defense I like to
>say that with the possibility to easily inserting fields comes the urge to
>fix them.
Gotcha.
>I was looking at initially looking at something simple as page number
>*grin*. Not simple! It involves header/footer with a page number field
>inserted, so in order to do page number and header/footer there must be a
>way to add fields. So it all pointed to the Field dialog.
Actually, I'd been looking at it the other way. The field dialog isn't much
help until someone gets brave enough to implement editable headers and
footers. As you can tell from playing with the existing header/footer
support, there's a lot of work still to be done there.
Has anyone put much thought into this yet, or should we write it up as a POW
for next week? I'm thinking that this one will be more than a day's work.
;-)
>I like to say that I agree totally that the Field Dialog is not ready for
>binary releases. Perhaps it should be in UT_DEBUG?
Yeah, that sounds like an *excellent* idea. It should be quite easy to put
the right #if in the edit method, so that production builds still get the
"not implemented" message.
>> However, releasing a UI for this feature now would make the problem much
>> more serious.
>
>Naturally, having more people saving files using a format that will change
>is not good.
Agreed.
>> I'm not sure whether we'll need all of Word's complexity here, but as soon
>> as we have a decent idea what #3 looks like, we should have more insight
>> into what's needed for this dialog.
>
>Well, Word has just one more listbox, and an option for changing format.
>It's not than much to add, when we have the functionality.
Yep. I just took a look at Word's dialog and it's very tempting to remove
all the stuff which allows people to enter all those cryptic codes directly,
especially when the Options subdialog provides a better way of adding them
anyhow.
>> There are probably also issues about how to handle localization here, but
>> I'm sure you'll have great ideas on how to handle that.
>
>After several mistakes, Word has reverted to NOT localizing field names,
>and as a result of that even the description is not translated. I don't
>know how we should do, but it's not a straight forward thing.
Wow. That sounds nasty. I agree that the underlying format code should not
be localized, but it's not clear whether those should ever show up in the
UI. Deciding not to localize the descriptions sounds obnoxious.
Is it just a matter of not enough space in the dialog for translated strings
to expand properly, or is there something more subtle going on here?
Paul
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