> I've noticed that we've had a few new coders recently looking for a good way
> to get introduced to the codebase (hi, Todd and Ove!), so here's a meaty
Hi! Not a coder yet... Still learning. :)
> little feature we've been getting a lot of requests for recently:
>
> Allow folks to change the margins.
I may take a look at this. The feature is definately muy importante.
> To begin with, take a look at how paragraph margins are currently
> manipulated, by grepping through the src/wp and src/text subtrees. (Or, you
> could look at the tabstop code, since they're quite similar.) Essentially,
> what happens is the user drags around a widget on the ruler, and under the
> hood we use that to adjust the corresponding block-level property
> ("margin-left", "margin-right", "tabstops", etc.).
>
> Currently, the top and left rulers display narrow gray bars at the document
> margins, which could also be dragged around to reset the corresponding
> section-level properties ("page-margin-left", "page-margin-top", etc.).
>
> This should be a fairly straightforward way to introduce yourself to some of
> the interactions between the UI and the underlying formatting logic. It's
> all XP code, so you'd have the instant gratification of getting the feature
> working on all three platforms simultaneously.
>
> Any takers?
I will take a gander. I am still mucking around. I haven't had a ton of personal
time lately, but am scheduling Abi-Time! here in the near future. I am really
intriqued with this project.
> Paul
Something I am curious about. Is there documentation being written yet for
AbiWord. Of course, it shouldn't be overly difficult to write it after the fact,
but, it is something to think about. I think documentation is a problem with
open-source projects. Not volumn per se, but quality/ease of use is very
variable with lots of gaps. This project is very well organized it seems, so I
doubt it will be a problem when v1.0 is ready... or will it? Just planting a
meme.
Also. As a newcomer looking at the code, I notice one glaring thing. Not enough
comments. There are whole sections of code with no comments whatsoever --- or
comments that say very little. You have to remember that new people will be
looking at this and that even the original coders will forget. Job security is a
non issue here people. Comments are nearly as important as the code.
Just my 2 cents.
:)
-- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Todd Warner <taw@pobox.com> - Writing from work! ACK! CS student - Wright State University - PGP key at servers everywhere ------------------------------------------------------------------------------