Re: Editing and formatting characters
- From: bstell netscape com (Brian Stell)
- Cc: gtk-i18n-list gnome org
- Subject: Re: Editing and formatting characters
- Date: Thu, 16 Nov 2000 17:44:11 -0800
Owen Taylor wrote:
> The basic situation where I see a need for handling editing in
> invisible-formatting-characters mode is that someone gets a document
> that has these characters in it for some reason and fires it up
> in their text editor.
>
> I don't want to default to always displaying the formatting characters
> because a) that would be confusing to novices b) that would be
> disruptive to actually reading the text. So, we need a reasonable
> way of handling normal editing operations with invisible formatting
> characters.
>
> I believe having invisible cursor positions is confusing and if you
> really want to edit the formatting characters in detail, they need to
> be visible, so I'd like to find a reasonable solution of automatically
> handling the formatting characters when editing the surrounding
> characters.
Making it as easy as possible for the novice is always a good
goal. However I wonder if a novice user editing a document with
hidden formatting controls is not going to be be confused regardless
of where one puts the cursor. Imagine what a "bizarre" behavior the
novice will experience when they delete a [PDF] as a side effect of
what they thought was a simple character delete.
One of the positive aspects of having a logical cursor position for
hidden characters is that the novice at least "knows something is
funny".
Would a cursor change when next to a hidden character be useful?
Would displaying the "hidden" character when it is next to the cursor
be useful? Perhaps as a bubble?
I'm glad to see others working on i18n so what ever you decide is
okay with me.
Brian
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