On 29 Jul 2007, at 18:12, Yen-Ju Chen wrote: > What I don't understand is you are talking > about the user interface of a text editor > or the internal text storage of a text editor ?
A bit of both. > For GNUstep application, such text is probably stored as > NSTextStorage, > which is a NSAttributedString already. Right. In Foundation it's a way of tagging arbitrary data to strings. AppKit builds on this to define some tags with certain presentation-related meanings. I think we should build on this to provide some defined semantic tags for headings, etc., and a mechanism for third parties to define extra semantic tags and a way of turning them into presentation tags. > The question is how do you present such attributed string to users. > Rich text editor present attributed string as rendered text > (bold, color, etc) > while LaTex-like editor present the attributes as tag. > If we don't want to have tag along with text, > then we need a pane which shows current attributes of selected text, > which is not that convenient. Exactly. For some tags we would want to change presentation attributes while editing, for some we only would in display mode. For both, we want a quick way of changing the metadata. It's trivial to make text bold in a rich text editor; you select it and hit meta- b. How can we expand this so it's (at least almost) as easy to add other tags. > I think the reason having tag along with text (LaTex, HTML) > is because people don't want to have a separate window for the > attributes. Good point. Another example is probably WordPerfect, with the 'reveal codes' function. This showed the document markup and allowed editing, and hid it when you were writing. > They can tolerate some extra tag in text to avoid keep turning head > to look another window. > So I guess the questions is actually how do you want to present > the attributes to users and which tag system you like to use. Maybe a quasi-mode where you hold down a modifier and a tag editor appears above the selected text? I'm not completely convinced. Some sort of in-stream view might also be nice if, as with WordPerfect, you could toggle it on and off. David _______________________________________________ Etoile-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/etoile-discuss
