Some people like interactive spell check and others hate it, but everyone in
both camps agrees -- our current implementation is annoying. I plan to
start working on making the interactive spell check less brain-damaged
either tomorrow or Monday.
Dialog-driven spellcheck is still up for grabs, and should probably wait
until I get out of the way.
>I understand that this is a development stage, but an options dialog would
>be highly appriciated :).
Yep. As with any of our dialogs, the trick is to:
- finalize the intended design,
- get all the hard work done in XP code, and
- show it off on any of the three platforms.
Subsequent ports to the other GUIs happen very quickly afterwards. ;-)
However, incremental approaches to dialog design haven't tended to work too
well because the dialogs have to keep getting revved on each platform to
stay in sync.
>I notice that there is no print preview implemented yet.
How necessary is "true" print preview? We've almost convinced ourselves
that "page layout + zoom" does the job for most purposes.
>Just keep up the good work, AbiWord has become my primary word processor
>and what's implemented so far works pretty well.
Thanks.
>I know C++ and am not currently hacking on anything, but I've never taken
>a look at your XP framework. If I can figure out the framework and it's
>within my realm of comprehension, I'd be glad to work on one of the
>unimplemented dialogs, or a non-page-layout mode (see above). Is there any
>documentation for the XP framework?
Great. We're always glad to have help. The dialog mechanism is pretty
well-documented (see abi/docs/ in the source tree), and we try to be very
good about answering code-related questions.
Working on "normal" view won't require *any* framework knowledge, since
that's all XP code which just makes calls into a pretty straightforward
graphics layer. This shouldn't take much new code (normal view is a lot
simpler to implement than page view), but it's likely to be a fairly
significant code refactoring task.
In a nutshell, you'd need to figure out which portions of the format and
drawing code (abi/src/text/fmt) can be shared with the "page view"
semantics. We intended to have a base View class which got shared between
various modes (Normal, Page View, Outline, etc.) but never did the cleanup
work to get it right. If you're looking for something meatier, this would
be a wonderful project.
Paul