Normal and web mode

Pradeeban and Aaditya,

I saw your patch concerning the text box menu not active in Normal and
Web modes (revision 30755). As the lines you removed were unlikely to
be a bug, I looked back in the SVN to find when they were added. That
code was added in revision 17660 and there is a thread in the mailing
list in November 2005 that discusses these changes. Two things:

1) We need to discuss what we want for the Normal and Web modes before
making these changes.
2) If we decide to restore the text box functionalities, we also need
to undo other changes made in revision 17660 (for example, the text
box context menu is deactivated).

Since text box made in Print mode are still visible in Normal mode, I
agree with you that it should be possible to draw a new text box in
Normal mode so I would keep your patch and also undo other changes in
revision 17660.

As an aside, I noticed that in web mode the document layout is very
similar to print mode with the web page effectively divided in pages
of the normal size only with no margin visible. So for example there
can be some extra space between paragraphs if only the first line of a
paragraph would fit on a virtual page, page breaks cause some odd size
space and setting a large distance between two paragraphs may be
preempted by the division of the document in virtual pages. Should we
instead have a continuous layout totally independent of the print page
parameters? Note that this requires a significant amount of changes in
fb_ColumnBreaker and I don't think that this is something we should do
prior the release of Abiword 3.0.

Regards,

Simon
Received on Tue Apr 3 02:59:15 2012