Re: [mlview-list]Text wrapping, text editing features, etc. in mlview

[Dodji Seketeli <dodji seketeli org>]

Hi, 
For everybody's information,  let me paste the links to the enhancement
requests posted by Baptiste and Scott so that we know what we are
talking about :

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=127064
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=129704

In the case of the second link, we will just consider the
the text wrapping request here. The undo request could be addressed
later.

> 	Here is what I suggest : to do text wrapping in editing widgets (the
> text fits the widget's size, so the user lets the editor do the
> formatting stuff and focuses on the content) ; and to make some
> modifications to the XML output (cutting lines, normalizing spaces,
> punctuations, whatever ; but I don't know how to do that with libxml2).
> And of course to let the user specify the format (line length, spaces,
> even indentation stuff) of the XML files.

Here are some actions we could start with : 

define a set a "constraints" applicable to each text node like: 
	*width of tabs in text nodes
	*number of spaces between characters
	*length of 'lines' (in number of characters, or number of words)
	*allow a 'verbatim' mode that is the roughly the one we have today,
i.e: the editor does nothing and just let the user type.

The user would then choose the set of properties she wants to be
activated and then type the content of the editing node.
The text editing widget would then automagically modify the typed
content to fullfill the constraints, and put that content into the
actual in memory text node.

Serialization and file loading wouldn't be different from what we have
today.

Is it close to what you (including the people who requested the feature)
were thinking about ? if yes, we can go on
and define more precisely (if needed) what to do concerning the
graphical interface and so on.

My 2 cents,

Dodji.