I've committed the new annotation support. The format has been
hashed out about two years ago, and I've worked off and on on
implementing it. The format is incompatible with the previous
annotation format, so any annotations in the previous format will be
lost (you can extract them from the metadoc if you want), but since
annotation support was never official in a released version, and was
buggy, I am not very much worried by this.
The annotations are stored in a PlkA-dbname database. One thing I
still haven't implemented is what happens when a new document is
sync'ed. I think what I'll do is ask whether to delete the old
annotations. The user can keep them at her own risk, but they may be
out of sync.
I need some help.
1. I'd like to have a toolbar icon for "annotate": after tapping it,
one would tap on a word to annotate that word. The icon of course
needs to match the current toolbar icons in style and size, and needs
to be in several sizes. See http://cvs.plkr.org/index.cgi/viewer/
icons/ for the current icons. Moreover, ideally, the annotate icon
comes in two states: an inactive state, and then an active state that
comes on after you tap it, while you have a chance to tap on a word
to annotate it. My suggestion is that the icon be a highlighter
pen. In inactive mode, the pen can be either shown lifted or closed,
and in active mode, it can be down or open.
2. Please bang on the new code. I'm sure there are bugs. The code
should appear in the next snapshot build, or you can build it
yourself from cvs. To add an annotation, go to the Lookup
Preferences, set word-lookup to be always active, and set the action
to annotation. Then, to make an annotation, tap on a word in the
text, and then either press OK just to make that word be highlighted,
or enter an annotation and press OK. Currently, annotations are all
linked to words in the text, and can be accessed by tapping on the
words. This is more or less sufficient for my needs. One could make
annotations attach to phrases--the backend supports any text range--
but a drag-selection UI would need to be implemented. The annotation
format is pretty much fixed now (though it is extendable, which is
one of the nice things about it), but the code is probably not stable
enough for production use. I.e., if you're a Shakespeare scholar,
please don't use the new annotation support to store all of your
precious commentary on Hamlet. (That said, the more likely thing to
happen with a bug is that the annotations will no longer be
displayable, but they could probably still be recovered.)
Additions in the near future:
I am going to (unless there are serious objections) make the bookmark
code store all of the bookmarks as annotations with a bookmark flag.
This means we can have one form to add a bookmark and annotation, and
the bookmark viewer/editor form will be able to view/edit annotations
(I will make that optional). I will add a bit of upgrade code that
migrates old-style bookmarks to new ones automatically. This will
also mean that the annotation backend (annotation.c) will no longer
be optional, though the frontend will still be controllable at
compile-time.
If anybody wants facilities for merging notes from different people,
this can be done with a desktop utility--the database format is very
straightforward (one annotation per record, with a simple header
documented in annotation.h). One concern, however, is that the
current UI will have trouble with overlapping annotations.
Alex
--
Alexander R Pruss
Associate Professor
Department of Philosophy
Georgetown University
www.georgetown.edu/faculty/ap85
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