On Thu, 14 Dec 2000, Dom Lachowicz wrote:
> Mike,
>
> This is an excellent suggestion that I've often wondered about. Then I wrote
> a preview control and it took like 5 seconds and 20 lines of code to do. I'm
> almost sure that creating an artificial document would be more work.
>
I believe you'd really have to create a whole new view and document.
Because of the beautiful OO design of Abi this could probabally be done in
less than 50 LOC. (Famous last words :-)
> However, I think that I'd like to start working on this new preview control.
> Why? Because I'd like to hook two things onto Abi in the near future and I'd
> like them to be as XP as possible - a template system and a "wizard" system.
>
> For templates, I'd like to be able to create mini documents inside of a
> larger scrolled window and have the user click on them and abiword would
> launch a "clone" of the template. For wizards, I'd like to display a
> document at the final stages of the wizard - to show the user exactly what
> he/she is going to get when he/she clicks on the "finish" button.
These are both cool features.
Another cool feature I've been thinking of is a "magnifying glass" to
show a zoomed piece of the document in a preview window that could be
moved over the document. Like right clicking in xdvi. That could use this
too. I'll leave that for post 1.0 though :-)
>I'm
> convinced that the best way to accomplish this is through a new preview
> widget.
Yes this would be much better. It would also improve the "paragraph"
dialog and the lists dialog. We could actually show the user eactly what
the list would look like.
<snip>
> It may or may not be the best solution for our simple dialogs
> though.
>
It would be overkill for page numbers.
> If anyone would like to help, I'd appreciate it. I'm busy with exams for the
> next week or so.
>
> Oh, and I made the preview widget smaller and added "text" to it so that it
> isn't just a big white square with a single number in it.
>
Great! I was going to suggest this. Great minds think alike :-)
Cheers
Martin
