Re: commit: Cut and paste MathML

>
> On Wed, 2005-02-02 at 11:32 +1100, Martin Sevior wrote:
>
>> > Martin, please don't do that. We already discussed the fact that we
>> > should stop using RTF for cut&paste internally anymore.
>> >
>>
>> Sorry Hub. I explicitly stated that I NOT agree to that.
>>
>> What I said was, your time is your own. There are lots of difficult
>> issues involved in migrating cuts and paste out of RTF with significant
>> costs.
>
> OK. Let's get started on that.
>
> -RTF conversion can cost too much in time. Yes, not everybody use a
> multi-GHz CPU on his computer. My fastest machine is still my 400MHz G3
> PowerBook. And I have seen case where RTF conversion was somewhat slow.
>
> -Having a bi-directionnal RTF conversion without loss has proven to be
> hard, even more of the data model we use is different than of RTF. And
> this is what we does, and this won't get better.
>
> I have been advocating that change, to NOT use RTF as a cut&paste medium
> INSIDE AbiWord, for a long time, for that exact reason.
> To achieve that, we should implement some object persistence for PT
> objects, and be able to insert them whenever needed. Shouldn't be hard,
> and would be a good occasion to sanitize a little bit.
>

It's not that easy Hub. You'll need to merge the objects to fit in with
the final destination objects depending on the context in the insertion
point.

This is what a lot of the extensions to RTF do for us now.

>
>>
>> I do not intend to spend my development time doing it.
>
> But you do spend time preventing people from doing it. I still haven't
> dug into PieceTable because each I have head-ache understanding
> *uncommented code* that seams to be interacting with everything else.
>

I guess I could write more comments as I go but most of the PT is pretty
much as we found it.

Please feel to ask on the ML about stuff that bothers you. I haven't got
to the bottom of everything either.

I find I don't have time to interact much on #abiword these days.

>> > What you are doing is just making our life harder to get read of that.
>> >
>>
>> I do not see how this makes your life any harder and saves me at least
>> one month of development time.
>
> You see *short term*. I see *long term*. As said above, this feature
> would take some time to implement, but once done, it would save A LOT of
> time because then RTF would only have to stick to the spec and eventual
> third-party crap, but not our own.
>

Except that I've explicitly stated I'm not interested in doing this.
You have. Do it.

> "abilist" is a good example of what I dislike with that cut&paste.
>

abilist is a specific example of why internal cut & paste is hard. A lot
of the abilist code exists to merge a list from one region of the code
with a list in another part of the code. You'll have the same problems
working directly with the PT.

This was cool when I implemented it. MS Word 97 did not have this
functionality but I guess they worked it out for MS Word 2000.

I think that we DO need to find a way to avoid converting images to RTF
for internal cut and paste while making them availble for pasting to
external programs. I'm interested in implementing that because users (and
me) will see the benefits right away.

Martin.
>
> Hub
> --
> Crazy French - http://www.figuiere.net/hub/
>
>
Received on Thu Feb 3 23:16:41 2005