Subject: Re: Topic: Templates and 1.0
From: Dom Lachowicz (cinamod@hotmail.com)
Date: Thu May 03 2001 - 22:32:02 CDT
Hi Paul,
>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.
Sure, here's what I expect the UI to resemble (the Unix UI now resembles
this):
http://koffice.kde.org/kword/pics/kword9.png
>(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?)
No need to. I think that a rehashing could be beneficial if we're banging
heads or running up against a wall.
>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.
Sure, this is totally possible, and even preferable. This means that we
should no longer hardware values into the PD_Document class. I'm envisioning
the following - new pd_Document(NULL) returns a pd_Document.import() on some
standard and defined default template:
<abiword>
<styles>
<s name="Normal" props=""/>
<s name="Heading 1" props=""/>
...
</styles>
<section columns="1" ...>
<p props="lang:en-US; align:left;..."><c></c></p>
</section>
</abiword>
This doc just basically contains all of the defaults that we rely upon/fall
back to.
>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.
We already have this functionality via File->Import and File->Export. They
thinly wrap backend calls that I've already implemented. This is necessary
for #1 && #2
>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.)
I think that this will be hard to implement and should be post 1.0, unless
someone steps up to do the code. The bulk of this functionality is contained
within proposal #2, but you unleash a huge can-of-worms when you talk about
redefining a whole *set* of documents based on some common stylesheet. I
find #'s 1 && 2 far more useful and much more commonplace than this
suggestion. It actually sounds like a perfect job for a PERL script, but Ms.
Secretary isn't likely to know much PERL :-)
Cool?
Dom
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