From: Dom Lachowicz (domlachowicz@yahoo.com)
Date: Thu Jul 31 2003 - 16:16:50 EDT
Hi Randy,
> Aside: Is "assignedle" a word? (as in "strengthening
> of our architecture as a
> assignedle.")
Sorry for the typo. I'll correct it eventually.
> Question 1:
> leadin: I think the reference to PERL, Python,
> Scheme might have been added
> after my first reading, but looking at the bit about
> "Use above C API/ABI to
> expose ourselves to the outside world.", I realized
> that maybe there is such
> a thing as external scripting and internal
> scripting.
I think that the scripting bits have always been
there. I did amend it, suggesting that we should use
SWIG so that we get like 10 language bindings "for
free" after we implement a C plugin API. This includes
PERL, Python, Java, C#, Ruby, Scheme, and ML as some
popular languages.
> question: In any case, my question is about being
> able to write "internal"
> macros that would let me do one of the
> (non-programming) approaches to
> collapsible outlining. (Basically, internal macros
> would need to be able to
> distinguish different text styles (with heading
> attributes at various levels
> vs. without heading attributes at all) and apply and
> unapply a hidden text
> attribute to the text to be collapsed. Is the macro
> capability to support
> that envisioned in 2.2?
There doesn't need to be a distinction between an
external and an internal scripting API. It might be
useful to have a "simplified" API for the casual user,
yes. Then again, this is probably something that you
can build inside of your scripting language, wrapping
various abiword calls into "more useful" ones that do
what you want it to. Or one could write more complex
calls inside of AbiWord that do some of the "more
useful/popular" types of thing that you'd like to do.
The only difference I really envision is that there
will be an 'AbiApp* new_abi_app()' call so that
external scripts can start a new AbiWord instance (in
addition to 'AbiApp* get_abi_app()').
I don't expect to have anything like what you want as
part of the standard API, Scripting API, or whatever
you want to call it. You might be able to iterate
through the various blocks inside of AbiWord. You can
get the "style" attribute, and see if it's "Heading*"
or not. If not, you could append "display:none;" to
its "props." I don't envision this being any easier
than the current C++ approach, unless someone steps up
to write some convenience routines.
> question: Is there a way to apply a new template to
> an ABiWord document (to
> change multiple styles simultaneously)?
Format->Style->Import Styles. Works for ABW and DOC
documents right now, and maybe RTF too.
Dom
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