Subject: Re: Multi-Paragraph Headers and footers?
From: Jesper Skov (jskov@cambridge.redhat.com)
Date: Tue Mar 06 2001 - 09:54:55 CST
>>>>> "Martin" == Martin Sevior <msevior@mccubbin.ph.unimelb.edu.au> writes:
Martin> HI everyone, I need your advice. I've reached a bit of an
Martin> impass with the headers and footers code to do with allowing
Martin> multiple paragraph headers and footers.
Martin> I think to make further progress with fixing the various bugs
Martin> associated with this I will have to format the overall
Martin> hdrftrSectionLayout. Since this SectionLayout does not have an
Martin> associated fp_Container this in turn will require lots of
Martin> surgury and bug squashing. I think this could eventually be
Martin> made to work.
Martin> On the other hand I could disable paragraph breaks when
Martin> editting headers, wrap up the edittable header/footers very
Martin> quickly and go on to the many other things that need doing in
Martin> abi.
Martin> A header/footer dialog, numbered headings, fixing tabs,
Martin> speeding up the code plus fixing numerious bugs are all things
Martin> I want to do.
Martin> So what does you think? Is it worth the time and potential
Martin> instablities to do multi-paragraph headers and footers?
As I've not wasted many opportunities to point out, I'm no WP user, so
my comments a probably not worth considering.
That said, I don't understand why headers/footers are special. The
way I see it they're just minipages that happen to be located on other
pages, specifically at the top and the bottom.
When I think of a footer, for instance, I'm thinking multi-paragraph
footers. Maybe because I'm thinking as an ex-LaTeX user rather than a
WP user. Some of our university papers had footers that would spill
from one page to the next.
What I'd like to see are two configuration points (excuse the crummy
ASCII art):
+---------------------------+
| header |
| |
+---------------------------+ max header height
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| body |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
+---------------------------+ max footer height
| |
| |
| footer |
| |
| |
+---------------------------+
And if you add a footer on page 1 which is too tall to fit in the
allowed footer space (on that page?), it spills into the footer space
on page 2.
Get it?
What this means is that the layout code is the same (hopefully
eventually replaced by Pango) whether used in the page body, headers,
or footers.
That is, what we should model is layout constraints for the layout
code to work within - we should not be handcrafting special code for
layout/editing in each of these special constraint boxes. Similar
constraints control how the cursor should be have when leaving a
constraint box (i.e., leaving body on page 1 should move it to the
body on page 2, not the footer on page 1).
Hm, maybe this is halfway into pagesetter land, but wouldn't it be
exceptionally cool if we in simple ways could allow the user a good
control of the page layout? We already have controls for page width
and height, why not controls of where footer/headers should go?
Jesper
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