Fellow Evolutionists,
time to report on my progress in the composer port. I'd appreciate any
feedback and ideas.
Disclaimer: a long email, you have been warned. For diligent readers, reward
at the end :)
When I was starting the port, I essentially just looked on the GtkhtmlEditor
sources and tried to clone as much as possible. What I ended up with is a set
of classes located in /widgets/editor (libeeditor), which at the end are not
really a clone of GtkhtmlEditor...
EEditorWidget - WebKit subclass, provides API for configuring behavior of the
editor
EEditorSelection - represents current selection in the editor widget and
provides API to modify formatting of the selection. I keep asking myself
if this could be merged to EEditorWidget, the main reason I haven't done
it yet is that e_editor_widget_set_bold() does not describe correctly
what the method does, unlike e_editor_selection_set_bold(). Also it makes
the source files smaller. I hate long source files... :-) But if you would
insist, I won't probably strictly object against merging it.
EEditor - a GtkGrid with toolbars and EEditorWidget. Can be subclassed to
something like ESimpleEditor to be used elsewhere in Evo with limited
set of features.
EEditorDialog* - implementations of all the dialogs. I decided to throw away
the Glade file and single .c with implementation of all the dialogs
because it completely violates all principles of OOP and because I have
to provide my own implementation of most of the actions in the dialogs
anyway, so the single signals file would be huuuge and ugly.
EEditorWindow - a GtkWindow which contains EEditor and simple API to pack
widgets above or below the editor. It's used by the signature editor and
composer and it's there so that I just don't have to copy-paste that
much (and because it's the right thing to do ;-).
EColorChooserWidget - this is a "subclass" of GtkColorChooserWidget.
Unfortunately API of the Gtk widget totally _SUCKS_, so it's more of a
hack. It's point is to make the color chooser to accept color by single
clicking it instead of double clicking.
EImageChooserDialog - this is a cool GtkFileDialog subclass that displays
preview of selected image next to the file list. The contact editor
does it too, but it does not provide the dialog as a separate class.
TODO: The contact editor could probably be ported to use this class
EEmoticon* - GtkhtmlEditor used to call this GtkhtmlFace, which is a silly and
confusing name. This is one of the very few parts that are almost exact
clone of GtkhtmlEditor code.
EActionComboBox - I dragged this from /widgets/misc, because I need it in the
Editor, but libeeditor can't link against libemiscwidgets (it links
against libeeditor).
I also tweaked some of the dialogs: for example the Find dialog now supports
search wrapping (because WebKit supports it :), "Insert Link" dialog has a new
"Remove Link" button and I also unified the buttons - all dialogs (except for
the Link dialog) now have only "Close" button, because the changes are always
applied immediately, so "OK" makes no sense there. This was slightly
inconsistent across GtkhtmlEditor dialogs.
I also ended up with my "own" implementation of spell-checking, which are
located in e-utils.
ESpellChecker - can list all dictionaries and can be used as "storage" for
currently active dictionaries. Also implements WebKitSpellChecker
interface, so it can be (and is) used as implementation of spell checking
in EEditorWidget/WebKit.
ESpellDictionary - a thin wrapper around EnchantDict which provides
reference counting and nice names (en_US -> "English (American)").
You can either e_spell_dictionary_{learn,ignore}_word() for specific dictionary
or e_spell_checker_{learn,ignore}_word() for all active dictionaries in the
spell checker. The ESpellChecker.
Behavior of the editor is almost identical to GtkhtmlEditor, except for HTML
mode -> Plain text switching. GtkhtmlEditor is simply switching renderers on
top of a single DOM document, but we can't do this with WebKit. I looked how
others do it and ended up with a "Switching to plain text will lose all
formatting, OK?" dialog. When user confirms, all formatting is removed and
plain text version is inserted back to the editor. Switching from Plain text
to HTML does not alter formatting in any way (because there is no formatting
to alter :) The "Undo"/"Redo" actions might be slightly broken/inconsistent
with Gtkhtml as well, because I don't have access to the action stack of
WebKit, and WebKit records only some actions. I'm using these actions I know
that WebKit records to do most of the formatting/DOM manipulation, but on some
places it's just not possible to get the right result this way.
That's probably all about the editor. All the GtkhtmlEditor functionality
should be there and I'm quite satisfied with the code, maybe some minor
refactoring here and there, but in general I can call it beta stage.
I begun porting the actual composer code to the EEditor a few days ago, and
it's progressing incredibly fast. I just need to hook in few actions and
events here and there and port signature handling and it' done. GtkhtmlEditor
had a set of commands for the signatures, but I'll have to handle it all by
DOM manipulation.
During the port I've run into at least one "unportable" thing - WebKit does
not provide any means to change color of the underline of misspelled words, so
I'll probably have to remove this feature (I don't see much use in it anyway).
Finally, Milan had some objections against the "EEditor" prefix, feel free to
discuss a better alternative.
I'll write a blog post when the port is merged to master. I'd like to do the
merge as soon as possible, because my time to continue working on it will be
more and more limited during the semester, so the sooner you can test and
report back the better. Feel free to start testing already (you can use the e-
editor-test utility to test the editor itself). If you want to report bugs,
please use evolution[composer] and evolution[webkit] whiteboards.
Sorry for the long mail, but now I can just point people here instead of
explaining myself over and over. And it helped me to sort it all nicely in my
head :)
*Promised reward*
Screenshot!!! http://i45.tinypic.com/2uojg9g.png
Do you see the huge difference between Gtkhtml and WebKit? Me neither...:-D
Cheers,
Dan
--
dvratil redhat com | Associate Software Engineer / BaseOS / KDE, Qt
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