From: Andrew Dunbar (hippietrail@yahoo.com)
Date: Wed Mar 20 2002 - 09:11:45 EST
--- Philippe DEFERT <philippe.defert@cern.ch> wrote:
>
>
> When you open a text file in abiword, it always
> takes it line by line,
> i.e. it adds an end of line at each LF. When you
> write a text in emacs
> there is an automatic wrapping to 72 columns and
> this inserts a LF. I
> saw in lyx a very nice feature when you import a
> text file, you can
> choose to get it line by line i.e each LF is an EOL
> or you can do the
> same paragraph by paragraph i.e. each 2 lines
> separated by 1 LF are
> joined, as soon that you have a blank line which is
> equivalent to 2
> consecutive LF, a EOL is added to make a
> "paragraph". This is called in
> the lyx jargon "import text as lines" or "import
> text as paragraphs"
>
> Is there the same feature in abiword ? If so, where
> can I find it, if it
> does not exist I think it could be simple to
> implement though very very
> useful in UNIX. I am not enough into abiword's code
> to do it myself...
>
> Amicalement.
> Philippe.
Hi Philippe. I did a lot of the work on the text
import/export and have thought about this a lot even
this week. If we import in this way we probably also
need to output this way. Most "plain text" files that
I see seem to have "hard" line breaks whereas WP docs
seem to rely on word wrapping. Adding hard line
breaks on export would certainly need a dialog or a
prefs setting on which column to put the breaks.
Since
we also have already a "human-readable" plain text
exporter I often wonder if this is the place for such
code and its counterpart, "human-readable" importer
would need to be created. This makes me wonder if a
better name for such importer/exporters would be
needed.
Another to keep in mind is that WPs have both the
concept of a paragraph and a line break. Think <p>,
</p>, and <br/> in HTML. Unicode also has characters
for both and MacOSX seems to reccommend using them.
In MSWord a paragraph is created with the return key
and a link break is created with shift-enter. I'm not
sure that Abi already supports both but it probably
does. We probably need to think about all these and
see what OSX actually does in the real world.
A feature request at http://bugzilla.abisource.com is
a good place to put ideas.
Andrew Dunbar.
=====
http://linguaphile.sourceforge.net http://www.abisource.com
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