Subject: Styles Dialog
From: Tim Allen (rita_tim@tpg.com.au)
Date: Thu Feb 01 2001 - 03:50:26 CST
I started some work on the styles dialog, but didn't get far before I read
Dom's announcement that someone else was working on it, so abandoned my
effort. However, I thought my design notes might be of some use to whoever
is actually doing it, so here they are. Do with them what you will. At the
least, it's useful to provoke some discussion of what the dialog is
supposed to do _before_ a working implementation gets checked in. I think
the lists dialog would have benefitted from such a discussion.
This is all fairly rough, just a brain dump, really, but anyway, here 'tis:
// Styles
// To define a new style, basic idea is we want to use a piece of
// existing text as the template. This text will already have a style,
// so we can use its style as the parent style for the new style
// Then we just make a style with the same props/attrs as the piece of text
// When we open the styles dlg with some text selected, if the format of
// that text is different from its style and is homogeneous, we give the
options of
// a) update the style to match this text (and then update the format of
// the rest of the doc to reflect the style change
// b) create a new style, inheriting from the current style with whatever
// differences from that style that this text has
// c) doing nothing, just going to the normal styles dlg
// Functions in the styles dlg include:
// - rename a style
// - delete a style (any text in this style reverts to parent style, maybe
with mods)
// - create a new style identical to an existing one
// - maybe, explicitly create a new style based on the current selection.
// ie same as if option b) had been chosen
// - show summary description of a style, ie name of parent, list of
// different properties
// The style dlg itself does not need editing of formatting options
Tim
-- ----------------------------------------------------------- Tim Allen http://www4.tpg.com.au/users/rita_tim/ tim@proximity.com.au rita_tim@tpg.com.au
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