Scripting Resources, Collapsible Outlining

From: Randy Kramer (rhkramer@fast.net)
Date: Mon Jun 23 2003 - 14:12:19 EDT

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    <please reply to a list (the list you are subscribed to) rather than me
    personally to keep the discussion going (if it gets started ;-) >

    Is anybody out there doing any scripting of AbiWord (in either Python or
    Perl)? (I think that's the right question -- I want to write some "macros"
    to run in AbiWord, as can be done in, for example, Word -- things like
    recording a series of keystrokes and then being able to play them back, but
    perhaps a little more complicated as I'd want to do things like search and
    replace and similar functions.)

    Can anybody point me to some good resources? (I'd have to learn Perl or
    Python, Perl could be a better choice because many of the things I want to do
    involve search and replace using regular expressions (but, I'd rather learn
    Python, I think).)

    The reason for the inquiry is that I've managed to write some macros for Nedit
    which can do folding of "raw" TWiki text files based on heading levels.

    I am now certain that I (or somebody else ;-) could write macros for AbiWord
    to do collapsible outlining (very analogous to folding) based on heading
    levels. (Collapsible outlining on heading levels is what MS Word does.)

    Plus, for anyone who desires an automated table of contents, if you collapse
    the outline of an AbiWord document, you have the essentials of a (the?) table
    of contents.

    The Nedit macros are at http://TWiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Wikilearn/NmTWikiFold.

    To avoid misleading anybody, I should say that:

       * the macros are (currently) only a subset of what I eventually would like
    to have (basically, they can fold the entire TWiki file to any heading level
    (1 thru 6) or unfold it completely, I haven't written a macro to fold or
    unfold a single heading or selection, or to do any promotion, demotion, or
    "moving")

       * the macros work fine without any modifications to Nedit, but the overall
    user experience could be improved by changes to Nedit (like (maybe) adding a
    toolbar, a specific folding view mode, etc.)

       * also, they are of the "brute force" type, not very elegant

    Randy Kramer

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