Re: bookmark idea

Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Sat, 13 Mar 1999 10:03:10 -0800


At 09:44 PM 3/10/99 -0800, Micah Yoder wrote:
>How hard would it be to implement bookmarks? That might be something I
>could try to get my feet wet in a project like this. I'm thinking
>something like this: When you right click in the text, you get the
>normal menu (of course it doesn't yet - when will that be implemented?)

Hey, is Jeff responsive or what? Context menus are there now. :-)

>from which you could select "Bookmark this...". You'd then get a dialog
>box asking the name (defaults to the word(s) after the cursor) and radio
>buttons asking when the bookmark should expire - in X
>minutes/hours/days, after the end of this AbiWord session, or never.
>That would let you bookmark something temporarily without having to
>delete it later. The default would *probably* be expire at the end of
>the session, but could be changed. That expire thing is just an idea I
>had - I'm not sure if any other WP implements it! Seems like it would
>be useful. Of course, another right-click menu option would be a
>submenu listing all active bookmarks.

Sounds like a good project.

Do you know whether you'd like to bookmark a spot in the document (ie, just
before this character) or a span of text (these words)? The implementation
would probably vary depending on which choices you make on this and other
design questions, such as:

- Can the user see the bookmark there somehow? How?
- Should the bookmark get removed when you delete text near it?
- Are bookmarks atomic, or can they be split?

My off-the-cuff guess is that you could implement the former as a hidden or
zero-width field in the document -- at the moment, we only have one
calculated field (for timestamps) and it *does* have a width, but that can
be changed -- whereas the latter would be a CSS-like property on that span
of text.

Since you probably want bookmarks to be unique, I suspect the former makes
more sense, but some more design and implementation experience should make
the choice clearer.

>I might be willing to try to add something like that, but I'll need to
>get more familiar with the code first...

Great! Give a holler if you get too lost in the code, and we'll be happy to
help you find your way around.

Paul



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