Re: Features needed for high-end DTP apps

[Joaquín Cuenca Abela <cuenca pacaterie u-psud fr>]

On Thu, 2002-10-24 at 21:55, Damon Chaplin wrote:
> On Sun, 2002-10-20 at 21:09, Owen Taylor wrote:
> > 
> > Joaquín Cuenca Abela <cuenca pacaterie u-psud fr> writes:
> > 
> > > On Sun, 2002-10-20 at 17:20, Owen Taylor wrote:
> > > > 
> > > > Other than speed consideratons, TeX line breaking is unsuitable
> > > > for interactive apps because it is very disconcerting to the user
> > > > to have parts of the paragraph before the cursor changing as
> > > > you edit.
> > > 
> > > I don't quite agree, here.  When I used InDesign 2 it didn't looked
> > > "very disconcerting".
> > > 
> > > Most of the time, new characters don't change previous line breaks, so
> > > overall it works in a pretty intuitive way.
> > 
> > I'm basing my comment on the using the editor in Chris Lahey's 'go', 
> > which used libhnj. It may be that InDesign does something a bit more
> > sophisticated.
> 
> We could do something similar to how Quark does forced alignment. When
> you are initially typing in the paragraph, it just uses normal justified
> alignment, but when you hit Return to end the paragraph it switches over
> to forced alignment (i.e. the last line spreads out to fill the line).
> The paragraph then keeps its forced alignment, even when you edit it
> again.
> 
> In our case, we could do simple line-breaking (i.e. break at the first
> available place) while you are editing, and switch over to fancy
> TeX-like line-breaking when you finish the paragraph.

Remember that the user is most likely to find disconcerting the behavior
of a TeX-like paragraph algorithm at the edition of an existing
paragraph.

The creation of a new paragraph usually works much smoother than the
edition of an existent one.

Cheers,

-- 
Joaquín Cuenca Abela
cuenca pacaterie u-psud fr