Subject: Summary info (was Re: Some of Word's fields)
From: Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Date: Thu Jan 13 2000 - 14:23:20 CST
At 07:30 AM 1/13/00 -0600, Justin Bradford wrote:
>Some of the fields rely on user/document information which AbiWord does
>not currently store, however. How about adding a summary info section to
>documents and have AbiWord store generic user information?
Sure. I don't think there are any major technical obstacles here.
- Generic user information would be stored by the existing Options/profile
mechanism, and presumably take up their own pane in the Options dialog.
- Likewise, adding summary info to the file format should be pretty easy
too, once we've figured out the syntax. (Doing it all via args on the
document sounds easiest, but it looks like there's so much content here
that this might get a bit unwieldy, especially if any of those contents
need to preserve whitespace or linefeeds.)
- In fact, the most time-consuming task here would probably be adding the
relevant dialog under the File menu. :-)
The only thing to consider are the policy implications here. The last thing
we should do is *require* that user information be provided or wind up in
documents. Privacy-minded folks would be all over us if we made that
mistake. :-)
Still, that last point is easily addressed, by one or both of the following:
- a checkbox on the user info Options pane which says something like:
"Don't include this information in my documents"
- a button on the Summary Info dialog which keeps any calculated info, but
wipes some or all user-specific information (depending on the exact
semantics, this would probably be labelled Clear or Default)
How does that sound?
Paul
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