Subject: Re: Tab dialog
From: Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Date: Fri Jun 16 2000 - 10:41:41 CDT
At 08:37 AM 6/16/00 +0000, Aaron Lehmann wrote:
>I hacked shack's tabs dialog to be up to date with CVS. I've attached a
>diff. When I use this dialog, it doesn't really do anything. I'm assuming
>this is just a start with the UI. I would like to work on it, but I am
>quite confused about what the dialog should do and how it should work.
Excellent! Considering that most of the underlying view-level functionality
is already available, this should be a fairly straightforward exercise in XP
vs. platform dialog-building. For more details, see the original POW:
http://www.abisource.com/mailinglists/abiword-dev/99/November/0121.html
Plus which, whoever decides to tackle the leaders gets to do a little
playing around with the formatter.
>It
>manages tabs, I suppose, but I have never used such a dialog or found a
>need for one.
Like the paragraph dialog, it mirrors functionality already supported by the
ruler -- in this case, adding, editing, and removing tabstops.
Not only does this provide an alternative for people with screens too small
to keep the ruler onscreen, but it also allows finer-grained control of tab
placement. The ruler automatically snaps to certain unit-specific
intervals, so if you really want a tabstop at *exactly* 2.312 inches or 17
picas, this dialog is the only way to do so.
Also, the ruler doesn't provide any way to manipulate the leader characters
drawn for a given tab. You need the dialog for that, too.
>Is the way the interface should be defined already designed
>or can I take a stab at cleaning it up? I would appreciate some pointers
>from someone who "gets" this dialog. It sounds like a fun project to me.
From looking at the screen shot in CVS, it looks like shack put a lot of
great work into the existing Tabs UI layout, so let's stick with that:
abi/shots/wp/unix/tabs.png
The only things I noticed there were an easily-fixed typo (Center) and an
alignment glitch (left column of radio controls misaligned).
However, to get all the behaviors right, you may need some pointers from
someone who's used comparable dialogs in, say, Word. Any volunteers?
Have fun!
Paul
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Fri Jun 16 2000 - 10:36:04 CDT