From: Martin Sevior (msevior@seviorpc.ph.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Thu Nov 06 2003 - 22:35:07 EST
On Fri, 2003-11-07 at 12:54, Leonard Rosenthol wrote:
> At 12:42 PM +1100 11/7/03, Martin Sevior wrote:
> > I've thought some more on Marc's AbiShow proposal and I now
> >mostly agree with him.
>
> Do you mean about the tree or about the software itself?
>
> Does there exist a "spec" for AbiShow? Design discussions?
> Philosophy?
>
> Having authored one of the original "Presentation" tools,
> Aldus Persuasion, back before there was even a catagory for such
> things - I have a lot of experience with the market and would like to
> know which problems are being solved, which methodologies are being
> used, etc.
>
Well the vision is for a "PowerPoint" replacement. The methodology is to
re-use as much of the AbiWord code base as possible.
We already have a state-of-art piecetable, text engine and OO design
that gets us a very large way to where we need to be.
The animations part requires more code but I think we can do most of it
with the current code base. We just need to do a saveRectangle on the
region we write our animation to followed by a restoreRectangle call to
get it back to it's previous state. We can draw text and images at
whatever resolution we like where-ever we want on our graphics class and
them wipe out all traces with this method.
We have preview classes that allow us to draw into any rectangular
region we want so we can preview slide animations like PowerPoint.
I think most of the work will be:
Writing all the animation types. (fly,zoom,spiral etc)
The code to to do overall views of the document so you can
cut/paste/move/hide slides in an easy graphical way.
Plus the whole import of of PowerPoint and/or OO formats.
There will be lots and lots of detail work.
Will any of this happen?
I don't know. However I think the chances of this happening are much
much less than if I write these emails.
Martin
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