Re: design q -- simplifying the spell dialog UI

Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Thu, 14 Oct 1999 08:23:04 -0700


At 08:03 AM 10/14/99 -0400, Thomas Fletcher wrote:
>I don't think that it would be a big deal if you are just looking at
>the unformatted text in the preview (as opposed to a mixed combination
>of fonts, styles, sizes etc). We got editable text boxes on BeOS to
>ya know =;-). Of course an XP solution would rock, but I'd be happy
>to make the text box editable.

Yeah, for richer formatting, we'll definitely want an XP solution. Later.

Even now, I'm not sure we can do without formatting entirely, though. The
current read-only preview isn't completely unformatted -- it changes the
color of the misspelled word in context.

On GTK, this capability is built into the basic editable text control.
On Win32, we have to switch from an edit control to a rich edit control.

Any ideas on how we should handle this now using existing BeOS widgets?

If there's no good way for you to vary the color inside an editable control,
I suppose a reasonable BeOS-specific workaround could be to put a read-only
copy of the word after the prompt, perhaps in a different color. Forgive
the ascii art:

Not in Dictionary: frazzzled
+-------------------------------------------------------+
| This spell check stuff has me totally frazzzled, |
| because I like to make everything pretty. |
| |
+-------------------------------------------------------+

Suggestions:
+-------------------------------------------------------+
| frazzled |
| |
| |
+-------------------------------------------------------+

What do you think? It's not as good as having the color change in context,
but should still work for now, especially if you set the cursor inside the
edit control to just after the misspelled word, so folks can locate it more
easily for editing.

Paul



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