Feedback on Annotations draft.

HI Ernesto,
           I've looked through what you have added to the wiki page for
annotations.

http://www.abisource.com/twiki/bin/view/Abiword/AbiAnnotations

 Thanks very much!

I think we really need basic annotations to be available for AbiWord 2.6
because it nicely complements our big new feature, AbiCollab. A prime
use case for AbiCollab will be schools and Universities and particularly
Write OLPC.

To be useful, teachers will need to be able to add comments to work
submitted by students so I think a minimum first goal for the project
will be:

1. Allow selected regions of the text to have a comment associated with
them.
2. Define a standard way to display that a region has a comment
associated with it.
3. Make displaying the comment user-definable and potentially printable.

Possibilities for displaying a comment are:

1. Box in the margin with the comment.
2. A popup that appears during a mouse-over.
3. make the text appear inline with a defined format. This should be
hidable.

Regarding implementation, I agree that annotations should be represented
in the piecetable in a way similar to footnotes. However we will need
to combine this with the mechanism we use for hyperlinks to show which
region of the text is associated with a comment.

If we use the footnote mechanism to hold the comment in the piecteable,
the easiest method to display the comment is either the popup box or a
comment in the margin. Putting comments in the margin is also a straight
forward way to allow printing.If we pursue this path we will have to
expand the size of the left margin in OLPC Write.

Cheers

Martin
Received on Mon Jun 4 04:15:35 2007