Re: Interesting comments on Footnotes

[Jody Goldberg <jody gnome org>]

On Fri, Dec 05, 2003 at 12:34:54AM +0000, Charles Goodwin wrote:
> On Thu, 2003-12-04 at 23:16, Dom Lachowicz wrote:
> > From my knowledge of the problem, this would probably be best done using 
> > PangoLayouts and PangoAttributes. I'd imagine that the "problem" here 
> > revolves around how Gnumeric interfaces with Pango and the user, rather than 
> > Pango's inadequacies. Jody could probably answer this better than I.
> > 
> > Abi's layout features are pretty darn good, but I think that it's probably 
> > overkill for the problem at hand and probably harder to get off the ground 
> > than something based around Pango.
> > 
> > Specifically, text orientation is something that's supposed to happen in the 
> > next major Pango release.
> 
> That sounds about right, at least for the short term.  Since Jody is
> Gnumeric it would not be worth speculating further until he makes his
> thoughts known on the issue - perhaps this is all already planned and
> maybe even partly implemented?

We'll get rotated text in charts shortly.  If that works out I can
think about it in cells.  The limiting factors are
    - drawing the text
    - Handling the effects of rotation on borders.  MS Excel has
      some _very_ funky (even by XL standards) behaviors.

> > Finally, both Abi and Gnumeric are capable of embedding themselves inside of 
> > other applications via bonobo. At the moment, neither is capable of being a 
> > embeddable container. Also, there is no well-defined "GnomeOffice Interface" 
> > that these components adhere to. I'd like that to change. Maybe you can help 
> > that happen.

Unfortunately I just broke that :-(
The GtkAction interface is very different from bonoboui.  It will
hopefully come back, but it will take some thought.

> I would like to see Gnome Office become a strongly coupled suite of
> applications that draw on eachother's strengths.  How a "Gnome Office
> Interface" would work or be defined is beyond my current capabilities. 
> The important thing, IMHO, is to get a discussion going that involves
> the key hackers of the would-be Gnome Office applications.

It would indeed be nice.  This is the most glaring weak spot in
gnomeoffice.  Ideally we can collaborate on a new file format soon.
Then use that as a platform to build integration.