Re: Word Processors

[John R Sheets <dusk smsi-roman com>]

Rebecca Ore wrote:
> 
>  I'm thinking of setting up a web page so we can have a central
> repository of idea, screenshots of interesting stuff, and a separate
> archive of this discussion.

Sounds like a good way to get it off the ground.  Any thoughts
about creating a mailing list for this?  This discussion could
potentially generate a lot of bandwidth.

Let me know when the site is up.  (c:

>  > 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.
> 
>  I think we're better served with simplier templates that cover most
> of the bases, especially if we're going to have ways to add templates
> simply.  One way is to write a sample document and declare that the
> template, say, highlighting various headers, making them a different
> weight and point size, and then naming that Super Bold Header One,
> then saving document as template Foo with style mark-ups.
> 
> Doesn't require scripting per se at all.  If I remember correctly,
> that's about the way Word templates can function.

Yep, that's my understanding, too.  You can embed text, font
styles, and even fields into Word templates.  I usually don't use
them, tho, because the interface is so elusive.  You have to
wander through many layers of dialogs to maintain your
templates.  The Word template UI is a good example of a
disassociative, distributed interface (just made that up :c).

Another thing that Word has is Autotext.  Granted, I'm not 100%
sure about its finer points, but I believe Autotext is basically
an insertion macro.  It would be nice to be able to include this
type of functionality for the GNOME version of templates.

For example.  Let's say you're using a Resume template.  The
template would probably only imbed a single entry for each
employment or education history.  To add 2 or more, you have to
cut & paste the original entry.  Wouldn't it be nice (my favorite
phrase) to let the template spit out the text blocks for you? 
(This could also be automated if you had the data stored in a
database.)  If you change to a different Resume template, the
format for these blocks will most likely change, so it seems
natural for the template to keep track of this.

How would all this fit into the XML/XSL/scheme model?

John