Subject: Re: List dialog
From: Martin Sevior (msevior@mccubbin.ph.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Fri Sep 22 2000 - 07:56:13 CDT
On Fri, 22 Sep 2000, Bruce Pearson wrote:
> Hi Martin,
>
> What is the current state of the list dialog? Do you have a screen shot? Is
> its state stable enough so I can implement a WIN32 dialog.
>
Hi Bruce,
The Dialog GUI code is almost finished as far as I'm concerned.
The only thing I have not finished in Linux front end is autodates of the
preview if the user changes the List delimeter text entry. I haven't done
this because fl_AutoNum does do this yet. It's trivial to implement this
and I'm sure Luke Jordan will finish off soon.
Luke Jordan has taken over the back end code. There are substantial bugs
in the backend implementation of sublists but Luke seems to have those
under control and is working on much improved system.
However all the hooks from the xp Dialog are in place to fully implement
the functionality present in the List code. I've added a few tweaks to the
autoupdating code too. I added a counter to Listener code that gets
incremented everytime a "notifylisteners" is broadcast. The autoupdater
looks at the counter and if it matches the value from the previous glimpse
it just returns. ie It only updates the dialog if the Listener counter is
different from its own.
We should do something similar for the wordcount auto-updater. It's a
small change.
There are a few tweaks that might be made to the xp GUI code. Right now I
map the entire width of the screen of Abi to the little preview window.
This means that small changes in the indents and position of the label
that show up in the document are lost in the preview window. It might be
better to amplify the changes in the preview instead even if text goes
offscreen after a 2 inch indent.
Also Thomas Fletcher originally wanted to preview real text from the
document in the preview window. However I thought that the headaches of
doing this properly in modeless dialog were not worth the effort so I
implemented MS Word style "grey boxes" to represent lines of text relative
to the List Label Symbols. Thomas may come up with ways to solve this (he
seemed to think it was easy) however this will all be xp code
It's a bit hard to send you an updated screen shot right now. I can do
that tomorrow. However it is not much different from the screen shot I
sent out a few weeks ago except the that the preview works now.
Anyway the bottom line is please implement a Windows Version of the Lists
Dialog! I'm very happy with the Linux version modulo the tweaks I talked
about. I think it is better than MS Word anyway :-)
Oh now I remember there is one potential major problem in the xp code.
Many of the new Symbols for Lists come the "Dingbats" fonts distributed
with the Unix version of Abiword. These fonts may be called something else
in Windows. If so we will need to duplicate the name of the fonts in
Windows in the Unix version (like we did with "Symbol" and "Standard
Symbols"). They might be called "typeset" or something..
Good Luck!
Martin
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