Re: Word Processors

[Todd Graham Lewis <tlewis mindspring net>]

If I can weigh in here, I have some suggestions about The Great Word
Processor Project:

1) All mjor parts should be componentized with baboon so that all
applications can reuse your work.  This includes spellchecking, thesaurus,
page layout, print preview, printer selection.

2) Perhaps most importantly, the document format engines should be
abstracted out as much as possible.  It would be nice if you could save
spreadsheets and gimp illustrations in PDF, etc. formats, and if they
did not have to re-implement to engines to do so.

3) I wish that the actual editing component be replaceable.  Think shades
of emacs-as-an-X-widget here.  Define the editing component as richly
as you think necessary via CORBA; go ahead and load it up with as much
functionality as you need to do real-time spell checking, etc.  But make
sure that it is abstracted out via CORBA, so that someone can take one
of the free VI's and make it into an editing component.  Same for emacs
and anything else that people want to use.  This component could also
be used in our notepad replacement.

4) It would also be nice if the API for interacting with the document
in progress were standardized.  That way, you could program your spell
checker, grammar checker, etc., all the same way, and it would be easy
to add a new module of this kind.

5A) On the template front, this is really not a programmatic concern,
except in so far as you have to make templates possible.  I would think
that you could make template writing very easy by allowing people to
write their dialogues in scheme, perhaps with some helper functions to
make dialogues very easy to write.

5B) The crucial thing in making templates useful to users is editorial
control.  You should pick someone as the template baron who exercises
dictatorial control over what does and does not go into the standard
template library which ships.  Without this, you are just going to have
a big pile of unorganized, duplicative templates which will confuse
the user.  I nominate Rebecca as the template baron; since she can't
program, but she's a writer, I think she'd be perfect for this.  (Let's
hear it for the nonprogrammers in the crowd!  8^)

5C) There should be a standard, easy API for adding and removing templates
from the library.  This will make it easier for people to accept that
not every template will make it into the actual WP itself.

Do these sound reasonable?

--
Todd Graham Lewis            32°49'N,83°36'W          (800) 719-4664, x2804
******Linux******         MindSpring Enterprises      tlewis@mindspring.net