Re: Announce: 2.0 release plan

From: Martin Sevior (msevior@physics.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Tue Jan 21 2003 - 20:47:53 EST

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    On Wed, 22 Jan 2003, Andrew Dunbar wrote:

    > --- Martin Sevior <msevior@physics.unimelb.edu.au>
    > wrote: > On 18 Jan 2003, William Lachance wrote:
    > >
    > > > Hi Dom, everyone.
    > > >
    > > > On Sat, 2003-01-18 at 12:08, Dom Lachowicz wrote:
    > > > > AbiWord development has been progressing at a
    > > > > marvelous clip and it's getting to the point
    > > > > where we should put another big, fancy DOT-OH
    > > > > release out there.
    > > >
    > > > > Expected polish/bugfix/improved 2.0 features:
    > > > > * Tables (UI, interaction, imp/exp)
    > > >
    > > > Specifically, I would like to see better handling
    > > > of table selections in 2.0 (I think there's a
    > > > bugzilla entry for this). Not my area of
    > > > expertise.
    > >
    > > I've thought quite a bit about this and to implement
    > > say selecting/copying/cutting/pasting ranges of
    > > cells we have to significantly extend our selection
    > > mechanism.
    > >
    > > Currently we have just two points for selections. An
    > > anchor and the current point.
    > >
    > > However to select a column of cells in a table
    > > requires selecting each seperate cell in the
    > > piecetable. Since cell are contiguous in rows (not
    > > columns) in the piecetable, this means we need a
    > > vector of ranges to remember the column selection.
    > > One range for each cell.
    >
    > If I am right, couldn't we use this same mechanism to
    > add support for cut/copy/paste of rectangular
    > selections? Most plain text editors and MS Word
    > support this and I miss it fairly often.
    >
    > It's definitely worth keeping in mind if we're
    > redesigning part of the import/export model anyway.
    >
    > I'll file an RFE...
    >

    Yes, this would be quite easy for copy text with the new model. Simple
    define a range for each line. I'm not sure what you'd do on the paste side
    though. Should se try to match the location on screen or position in the
    line. Text editors make the assumption of single sized characters.

    What does MS Word do?

    Cheers

    Martin

    > Andrew Dunbar.
    >
    > > Now in PD_Document there is a nice class
    > >
    > > PD_Document::tellListenerSubset(PL_Listener *
    > > pListener,
    > > PD_DocumentRange
    > > *pDocRange)
    > >
    > > Which will pump content from the range given by
    > > pDocRange into the listener.
    > >
    > > For cut/copy of tables we dump the content of the
    > > range into
    > > *.abw text, save it and then paste it back.
    > >
    > > This requires signficant changes to our
    > > ie_imp_AbiWord and
    > > ie_exp_AbiWord classes.
    > >
    > > In addition we have to write specific special case
    > > code to detect where in
    > > the piecetable each cell needs to be pasted in order
    > > to get the
    > > structure the user expects. For example swapping the
    > > order of two columns
    > > in a table requires working our the document
    > > position of each cell.
    > >
    > > I don't want to tackle this big problem yet but I
    > > thought I'd write out my
    > > thoughts. I'd be happy to provide voleneteers for
    > > this job with as much
    > > advice as I can give.
    > >
    > > Cheers
    > >
    > > Martin
    > >
    > >
    >
    > =====
    > http://linguaphile.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/translator.pl http://www.abisource.com
    >
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