Re: PATCH: AbiWord Sugar mode

On 7/26/06, Erik Pukinskis <erikpukinskis@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 7/25/06, msevior@physics.unimelb.edu.au wrote:
> > I think that having the font toolbar item would be useful. My observation
> > is that kids love to use fancy and large fonts if they can. It lets them
> > be creative. If you have space, giving them the font button will make that
> > easily discoverable. Has your research found out anything about this?
>
> I agree... and I've heard from people working with kids that
> formatting is one of the things they get really excited about. So I
> definitely think it's a must.

Yeah absolutely. For that reason i'm wondering if it was possible to
create something better than the traditional font dropdown (at least
conceptually).

Brain dump:

In basic editing mode I'd favour "emph" and "strong" formatting
instead of "italic" and "bold" (even though the latter might be the
respective standard represenation). Together with headlines and maybe
a few basic paragraph styles that would yield documents with semantic
(doh! ;-) meaning.

Example: Let's assume a headline in a document that's displayed in
boldface. If some part of the headline should be further highlighed it
is still possible to assign "emph" or "strong" and dynamically (as in
automatically) choose a different display style (e.g. bigger font,
underline or italic) so the highlighted part is distinguished
semantically AND visually.

Maybe document styling could be made an orthogonal tool to document
markup*? Related to that the idea of developing an "outline tool" as
Erik proposed might fit well.

What about one set of tools for markup and outline shaping and a
second one for effects like colours, fonts and decorations?

*) both functionalities WYSIWYG, of course

Cheers,
Rob
Received on Wed Jul 26 17:13:11 2006