From: Martin Sevior (msevior@mccubbin.ph.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Thu Apr 25 2002 - 00:49:48 EDT
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 24 Apr 2002 19:16:28 -0500
From: Eric W. Sink <eric@sourcegear.com>
To: Martin Sevior <msevior@mccubbin.ph.unimelb.edu.au>
Subject: Re: Comments on AbiWord layout engine (fwd)
Hi Martin,
I am responding to you once again, since if I keep the Cc
to abiword-dev it will be bounce. Feel free to forward.
> I've always wondered about issues like this. It's an idea from his
> head. Unless the algorithimn has been patented why can't he independently
> reproduce it?
Technically, this is up to Jeff. However, we all signed some
nasty documents regarding who owns "inventions" and such.
IANAL, but if I were, I would advise Jeff to keep that
particular secret bottled up. He risks being sued or
threatened by a group of people who probably have nothing
better to do than be schmucks. Why risk it when there are
plenty of other decent table algorithms around?
Also, bear in mind that although Jeff's 2-pass algorithm
is truly cool, it's brittle. I rather doubt it would
adapt to all the table layout scenarios you would want
to support. You're not actually missing out on that
much.
> I confess I haven't worked though this yet. At present my idea for text
> around images/frames was to place the image in a table and fill the other
> cells in the table with text.
I suspect you'll be unhappy with this choice later. This is one of
those square-peg-round-hole design decisions.
> > A very early version of the AbiWord layout engine was capable
> > of flowing text into a circle. It was cool, but it didn't
> > survive beyond the next rewrite. :-) Still, if I was trying
> > to design a second-generation layout engine for AbiWord, I
> > would at least try to consider non-rectangular containers as
> > I designed the space-negotiation protocol between containers
> > and subcontainers.
>
> I was going to leave this for later...
That's probably okay. After all, Word doesn't have round
columns. They're not a very user-focused thing to do.
Nonetheless, I've seen several layout engines that do it
well. Flowing into a round column isn't that much different
than flowing text around a non-rectangular image.
> Thanks for your thoughts Eric. Did you get a chance to read the class
> heiracy's I proposed for the next generation code?
Yes, I read the class hierarchies. The second one looked
better than the first. Both of them looked like starting
points that will get refined as you more carefully specify
the set of problems you actually want to solve.
Like I said in my first note, you're ahead of me on the
path of actually doing this, so I don't have much to say
that's terribly practical. Have fun!
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