Subject: RE: The New Styles (LONG)
From: Tom Newton (Tom.Newton@gtl.com)
Date: Mon Mar 19 2001 - 04:31:41 CST
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Paul Rohr [mailto:paul@abisource.com]
> Sent: 15 March 2001 18:24
> To: Tom Newton; abiword-dev@abisource.com
> Subject: RE: The New Styles (LONG)
[snip]
> proposal
> --------
> I'm very open to suggestions on either of these issues. Off
> the cuff, my
> gut feel is that, at minimum, we should persist:
>
> - one definition per style name (ie, "coalesce" issue B above)
> - all user-defined styles
> - any other template-defined styles (for consistency)
> - any other default styles used
>
> Implications:
>
> - any template style that got redefined would not persist
> - unused template styles would
>
> Moreover, the only way a default style would persist would be if:
>
> - it's used
> - it's not in the template
> - it hasn't been user-defined
>
> Does that make sense? Can anyone think of screw cases where
> this approach
> would get us into trouble?
>
> alternative
> -----------
> Note that the only space savings in this proposal are the omission of:
>
> - redundant style definitions at various levels
> - unused default styles
>
> IMHO, the savings from the former are significant, but the latter are
> presumably much less so. Thus, it might just be simpler all
> around to drop
> the "is a default style used" test. (It's certainly easier
> to implement.)
>
> Then the rule would be to simply emit the topmost definition
> for each known
> style, regardless of whether it's ever been used. Can anyone
> think of screw
> cases where this approach would get us into more trouble than
> the original
> proposal?
FWIW I think it's certainly simplest to emit all known styles. That is what
Maxwell does ;) for that very reason. However, I just had a quick play with
MSWord (exporting an RTF document - maybe saving to a .doc is different) and
it only seems to emit styles that have been used in the document (plus the
"default" style, i.e. "Normal") plus all styles that are in the template.
Copying this behaviour means that you need to keep track of the styles that
have been used in a document, so is of course more work to implement.
I guess there's nothing to stop you starting with a simple implementation
that emits everything and then at some point in the future moving to the
more complex behaviour.
In any case, either of the alternatives you've suggested would be a great
improvement on the existing implementation and my feeling is that one of the
proposals should be implemented before 1.0 is deemed feature complete. Of
course, it's easy for me to say this because I am all mouth and no trousers
;)
Tom
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