Having worked on a variety of shareware projects (mainly FontSmoother
and mySkin), I'm back to Plucker coding, continuing to plug away at
new annotation code. I am using Mike's (I think) idea to have a
database coded by uid, paragraph, and index in paragraph, so we can
do quick binary searching for any given annotation. The annotation
databases will be shareable, though they are keyed to a particular
version of a document. The current code will not allow overlapping
annotations, but there will be room to grow. The annotation database
format will be straightforward enough that it will be possible to
write an extractor on the desktop side, and to write merge software
(at least once overlapping annotations are done).
One thing I really hate doing is UI code. (Yes, I am sure you can
tell. FontSmoother is ample testimony.) There is one bit of UI code
that should be done. Currently, there is code to attach an
annotation (or highlight--highlights are just no-text annotations) to
a word, but no code to attach an annotation to a range of text. It
would be nice if it were possible to drag-select a bunch of text for
annotation purposes. This isn't as easy it sounds as we do not have
character positions available anywhere, except in the actual
rendering code. (In fact, word-selection was harder to code than it
seemed. I originally coded it for dictionary lookup, but since it
has been extended for use with annotations.) If anybody who knows
the paragraph.c code well has ideas on how best to do range
selection, those would be welcome. If anybody wants to volunteer to
write that part of the code, that would be even more welcome. :-)
Any thoughts on overlapping annotations and overlapping anchors
(annotations get converted to a special kind of anchor by the
rendering code) are welcome, too.
Best wishes,
Alex
--
Alexander R Pruss
Assistant Professor
Department of Philosophy
Georgetown University
www.georgetown.edu/faculty/ap85
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