Subject: Re: Advanced feature: piping selected text
From: Dom Lachowicz (doml@appligent.com)
Date: Wed Dec 19 2001 - 10:55:44 CST
On Wed, 2001-12-19 at 11:41, Sean Crist wrote:
>
> Just an idea for the long-term dream list here. For more advanced users,
> it would be nice to be able to create your own menu commands in AbiWord.
> The general idea is that you can select a range of text, and choose your
> user-defined menu command to pipe the text to some shell command (e.g. a
> user-written Perl or Python script), with the text being returned by the
> external program replacing the original text.
>
> If this were added, AbiWord would have to be coded defensively so that
> invalid XML returned by the outside program is detected and not accepted.
>
> Perhaps AbiWord would invoke the shell command with arguments passing the
> current selection range or insertion point, and would simply pipe the
> whole document, leaving it up to the external program what use to make of
> the selection range information. Or perhaps you specify in the command
> building dialog whether to pipe just the selection or the whole document.
>
> This is, of course, a very Unix-centric way of doing things; it could
> probably be done also e.g. in Windows, but not as gracefully. One of the
> real strengths to this idea is that the whole community of users can
> contribute features to AbiWord without having to learn all the internals
> of the source code.
Actually, I'm working on a plugin to do something like this. I'll let
you know when I'm done.
Dom
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