Subject: Re: Tables (How hard can it be) ?
From: Martin Sevior (msevior@mccubbin.ph.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Fri May 26 2000 - 07:25:48 CDT
On Thu, 25 May 2000, Johan Stenfors wrote:
> What is really the problem with tables ?
>
> I mean for me it seam to be only a matter of tabbing the table items
> into their proper places, not entily unlike the way HTML handles this.
> Once the structure is conceived it is only a matter of user interface,
> which could be very rudimentary at first.
>
> It the display rendered directly from the XML fileformat, or is there
> an internal format in AbiWord ?
>
I'm afraid it is much harder than that. What if the user enters text past
the next tab stop in a multi-column table?
I think that the right way to do this is to have rectangular frames within
the document. The frames grow in length as the text reaches the end of the
box. A table is series of frames with a common vertical dimension.
This needs a whole new infrastructure in abiword. It will get done but
first we should finish off the items in the checklist for 1.0. Of course
if you provides us with working code we would be delighted incorporate it
:-)
An interesting and doable challenge would be to implement the gnome-print
library for the gnome front end in place of the current unix printing
code. However you run the risk of being trumped by someone else getting it
done first :-)
John Tunison produced an initial patch that basically worked about 1.5
month's ago but we haven't heard from him since. Look in the mailing list
archives for it.
Cheers
Martin
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