Subject: Re: Upcoming releases
From: Martin Sevior (msevior@mccubbin.ph.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Mon Mar 12 2001 - 17:31:10 CST
On Mon, 12 Mar 2001, Paul Rohr wrote:
> >I intentionally removed the Border and shading dialog from non-debug builds.
> >It's there if someone wants to do it, but I don't consider it 1.0 critical
>
> OK. I just wanted to make sure that anyone who wanted to defend (and
> presumably implement) that feature knew that it was on the chopping block.
> Speak now or forever hold your peace.
>
> >and probably more work than it is worth.
>
> What makes it so bad? Getting a complex XP preview implemented for the
> dialog, or acually adding the drawing logic to the formatter? If it's the
> latter, which is worse -- weird line styles or shading the backgrounds?
Well for a start there is no backend code to implement any of this. In the
case of "shading" I think there would be some degree of complexity in
getting the background to match after a clearScreen operation. Currently
our clearScreen just paints over the selected region. For a shading
operation we would have to match the background pattern otherwise we'll
get discontinuities at the boundaries. This will lead to weird
rectangular regions around text in the shaded paragraphs.
This can be done but someone has to spend the time to work out an
algorithim to do it (or find time to dissect Open Office and steal their
code).
Borders is more tractible and I was actually thinking of
implementing a stripped down "Borders" dialog which would draw solid lines
around paragraphs. I want this so our headers and footer can have a solid
line under/over them with:
4.2 Implementation Details 12
---------------------------------------------------------------------
We have a collection of Linux Workstations for our Computational Physics
classes and it would please me no end to have my students write up their
reports in AbiWord.
Judging from past years they're addicted to these sort of Headers.
Anyway I know just how to make Headers like this Just Work it's a matter
of priorities as to whether I work on them now or later.
Cheers!
Martin
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Mon Mar 12 2001 - 17:31:22 CST