Bertrand et al:

I've been hacking away at the RTFLib/jfor stuff a bit. Except for TODO
items, the checkstyle stuff is complete. Also, I have written the beginnings
of the API doc, the latest version of which can be seen here:
http://forrestbot.cocoondev.org/sites/xml-fop/dev/rtflib.html
I have tried to highlight the independence of the package.

Question for Everyone:
I *really* like the approach of having the independent package, and
recommend that we use the same approach for other StructureRenderers,
including MIF, and the yet-unborn merely-glimmers-in-my-mind RawText and TeX
renderers. Any comments?

Questions (mostly for Bertrand):

1. How much does the API need to be protected? Are we pretty free to change
it as we see fit, or will that mess up existing jfor users too much? I'm
going to try to keep the doc up-to-date as we go, so that might mitigate a
lot of the pain of changes. Specifically, I am tempted to move some of the
constants (alignment and indentation for example) in RtfText to RtfParagraph
for a more intuitive interface. That is clearly not important to do now, but
some of the others below might be, so I thought it good to ask the question
now.

2. It looks like the border stuff gets ugly quickly, because of all of the
axes that it works on (which side, design, color, thickness, seems like
several others). Rather than trying to build 2**n boolean concepts (where n
is the sum of all of the possibilities on each axis -- just think about
color, for example), what do you think of the idea of building a Border
object with those axes as properties, then pointing to that object (or
better yet, an integer reference to it, ala ColorTable and the font table)
in the regular Attributes logic? That probably makes like easier on a user
as well as us. I'm guessing there are some other concepts that will benefit
from such an approach as well.

3. I so far have only made one substantive change: I have changed
RtfParagraph.writeRtfPrefix() to write the text attributes as well as the
paragraph attribute. It seemed to me that if the user wants to set those at
the paragraph level, it is good to be able to do so. They can still set them
at the Text level if they wish. However, I may be missing something here.

Victor Mote


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