Subject: Re: Headers, footers, and tab stops for formatting
From: Martin Sevior (msevior@mccubbin.ph.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Sat Mar 24 2001 - 23:01:27 CST
On Sat, 24 Mar 2001, WJCarpenter wrote:
> paul> Why? It sounds like an interesting abstraction, but off the
> paul> cuff I see no practical use.
>
> I see no practical use of arbitrarily restricting headers and footers
> just because someone can't think of an immediate use for a particular
> general feature. Multiple columns are just one instance of that. I
> already said I can't immediately think of a practical use for it, but
> I've only thought about it a total of 5 minutes. (Someone said
> having tab stops was the same as multiple columns. I don't really see
> how. If so, get rid of multiple columns from main body text.)
>
I can quickly think of a practical use. My Letter Head lists my position
and affilition at Melbourne Uni in a column on one side of a png image of
the Unimelb logo and contact details in a column on the other side of the
logo. Right now these are contained in a seperate section of my template
file for letters from me to other people. When we also allow different
headers on the front/even/odd pages it would make sense to put all that
into the header itself.
It's not something we need to do for a while but we will have to to
generalize the whole container code to handle tables, frames and footnotes
in post 1.0 abi anyway. When we do that it should not be too hard to have
multiple columns in headers/footers as well.
As it is I've just put in code to disable pagebreaks/section breaks/column
breaks/column changes in headers/footers. Each rapidly lead to segfaults
before. From a users perspective I can easily imagine them thinking "Cool,
I'm editting a header now I want 3 columns up here, ahhh there's the 3
columns button... crash" It's a bit better for them to press the 3 column
button and ... nothing happens. Oh I guess I need to grey out the column
buttons in Header/footer mode :-)
Cheers
Martin.
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