Subject: Re: Topic: Templates and 1.0
From: Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Date: Thu May 03 2001 - 19:03:34 CDT
At 10:53 PM 5/1/01 -0400, Dom Lachowicz wrote:
>I'm in favor of this. I've provided a backend that'll let us do templates,
>at least in the sense of the word that I'm thinking of. I also have some
>templates contributed by several people on the abiword-users list.
>
>My argument here is the following:
>1) This is most certainly an *expected* feature
>2) Most of the work has already been done
>3) It's not too hard to do anyway
>4) It'll be extremely easy to add new templates and have them "just work"
>(cvs add && cvs commit easy...)
Dom,
Could you provide more details on the backend and UI you're envisioning?
IIRC, I had a more complex notion of templates than your original proposal,
and I'm not sure we ever converged.
Specifically, I'm thinking of threads such as the following:
http://www.abisource.com/mailinglists/abiword-dev/01/February/0217.html
http://www.abisource.com/mailinglists/abiword-dev/01/February/0813.html
(Come to think of it, our more detailed discussions probably happened
off-list. Do you want me to dig them out and post excerpts here?)
I've always thought of templates that Just Work as offering something close
to the functionality of Word's infamous normal.dot file (and friends). This
notion of templates provides three somewhat-orthogonal benefits:
1. Personalization. By changing your own copy of normal.dot, you can
change the default look of all new documents you create, thereby avoiding
lots of UI complexities for changing the default font-size, paragraph
spacing, etc.
2. Boilerplate. It allows you to start new documents with other looks and
feels by copying in content and/or styles from another existing document
(which is usually read-only). For example, the fax cover sheet your office
uses can be opened repeatedly, creating a new document each time so you can
type in just the name, phone number, and a brief message in the right spots.
3. Style upgrades. Some groups need a "house style" for their documents,
so that everything that goes sent out has a similar look. By sharing the
same template for a whole series of documents, each document can look like
it goes with the others, which is mighty handy when doing stuff like
distributed authoring of chapters of a book, or something. Indeed, some
groups invest a lot of effort in devising really pretty templates that match
their letterhead, or whatever.
If those documents are written using styles, instead of explicit formatting,
then a template system that Just Works allows you to -- somehow, I forget
the exact UI incantation -- *upgrade* all documents which reference that
template so they all inherit the new look and feel. (For a rough example,
think of how HTML can reference and use an external CSS stylesheet.)
bottom line
-----------
IIRC, your proposal just addresses #2, and may have made UI choices which
would make it difficult to implement #1 and/or #3, both of which are quite
worthwhile, and neither of which should be tremendously difficult to do.
However, I really don't remember what you've wound up doing. This seems
like the perfect forum to get the alternatives straight so we can assess the
tradeoffs, if any. OK?
Paul
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