Glad to hear you've found some interesting coding projects to tackle. In
order of difficulty, they'd probably be:
- page numbers
- footnotes
- TOC
More details follow.
At 03:05 PM 7/18/99 +1000, michael@surfnetcity.com.au wrote:
>Well, if I finish off all the work I need to finish today (stupid in-house
>programming), I might take on footnotes myself, as they are absolutely vital
>to word processing.
Cool. We currently don't have anyone signed up for this, and we could
always use another expert on how the layout algorithms work. When you're
ready to get started, either Eric or I should be able to give you some
pointers into the relevant sections of the code.
>I'll also take on page numbers, which suprises me that
>they're not in there. Anybody got any tips as to where I may start doing
this,
>and how these should be done? (I haven't really gone through the AbiWord code
>much, as I've been bogged down with stuff for work)
There's some minimal work in the header / footer code for page numbers right
now. See abi/test/wp/footer.abw for an example.
What's really needed is a UI for inserting them. The easiest way to do this
would be to put a simple dialog behind the Insert/Page Numbers menu item.
The Word-like way to do this would be to raise a modal floating toolbar or
something when editing headers or footers to allow certain context-specific
operations there.
>As for automatic table-of-contents, I don't know how you'd go about this in
>AbiWord, as I'd probably use Lyx for something like that. (No offense to the
>Abi people there, it's just that "traditional" (eg. MS-Word like) word
>processors don't really cut it for documents with features like that)
Yeah. We haven't really designed TOC at all yet. There seem to be two ways
to do this for WYSIWYG word processors:
- automatically recognize certain levels of named styles (Heading 1, etc.)
- insert special markers for other indexable entities
If the former approach makes the most sense, we do have some rudimentary
support for named styles already, but there's no GUI for it.
As for the latter approach, there was a thread back in March which discussed
possible implementation ideas for inline marks, but none of those ideas ever
got implemented.
In short, there's still plenty of design and implementation work to be done
before we see this feature working.
Paul