Re: Word Processors

[Reklaw <nawalker earthlink net>]

I agree with just about all of this.

If you have 1 & 2, 3 is easy because the actual App is trival (some what) 
, it
just connects baboon objects.

On Wed, 16 Sep 1998 16:02:33 Todd Graham Lewis wrote:
> 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
> 
> 
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==========
Reklaw - I code therefore I need gin and sprite.
GNOME software projects - Pharmacy * gnome-standalone 
http://home.earthlink.net/~nawalker/