Re: Feedback on Annotations draft.

On Tue, 2007-06-05 at 12:29 +0100, Tomas Frydrych wrote:
> Hi Martin,
>
> My thoughts, for what they are worth.
>
> Martin Sevior wrote:
> > Possibilities for displaying a comment are:
> >
> > 1. Box in the margin with the comment.
>
> If there are more than few and/or the comments are not very brief, this
> would screw the layout beyond recognition. I am not sure this can be
> made to work in practice very well (at all).
>
> > 2. A popup that appears during a mouse-over.
>
> I like the pop up for on-screen use, but please be aware that mouse-over
> events assume a mouse, and hence do not work on devices that have a
> touch screen. It needs to be possible to pop the annotations by a press
> event, and it also needs to be possible to place the caret at a document
> position which happens to have annotation using a press, i.e., there
> needs to be spatial offset between the annotation mark and the document
> position.
>
> > 3. make the text appear inline with a defined format. This should be
> > hidable.
>
> I do not particularly like this. In the past, I have often annotated my
> documents with inline comments and they severely disrupt the flow of the
> original text, often being more trouble than they are worth. At the same
> time, this would be relatively simple (it's like text which has hidden
> markup), and it would work printing-wise.
>
> There is also the option to have the annotation comments in a separate
> container, either at the bottom of each page like footnotes, or at the
> end of the document like endnotes. For printing, I think I would prefer
> this to both the margin and inline options.
>

Hi Tomas and everyone else,
                           Thanks very much for your feedback. My
current favourite implementation is to place comments at the bottom of
the page like footnotes with the option of pop-ups during a mouse-over
or right click. We can hide the comments at the bottom of the page via a
menu option or print them out as the user wishes.

I like this approach because it will allow comments to be both printed
or hidden entirely. It allows comments to be as verbose as the author
likes without cluttering up the document too much. The pop-up allows
users to see the comments directly against the text. It also has the
virtue of being relatively easy to implement as we can reuse much of the
footnote code which has been almost fully debugged (at much pain I have
to say!).

It also doesn't mess with margins so this approach can be directly used
by OLPC Write.

Other opinions folks? Particularly Ernesto?

Cheers

MArtin

> Tomas
>
Received on Thu Jun 7 02:36:52 2007