I am taking this public for more comment. Martin and I have been discussing revamping the way AbiWord builds a label for a list. The following text does not use periods at the end of sentences, I thought it looked confusing with all the periods running amok.
Currently, the mechanism utilizes a formatting string that looks like "(%L)" or "%L." As the label is built, the %L is replaced by the value of a counter, for example if the counter has the value 3, the format string is "%L." and the list type is lower case, the label-builder will emit "c." If the label has a parent, i.e. it should add on another, higher, level number, it prepends the higher level label to itself, to get something like 2.c. I propose a different mechanism that uses a formatting string that, for the example above, would look like "%1.%2." This will allow, for example a top-level label like "Chapter 2." and a second-level label like "Chap. 2, sect. c" We could get even more fancy by using a full-blown fprintf ripoff and allow formatting strings like "Chap. %1I sect. %2i" to get a label like "Chap. II sect. iii" but that may be over the top. If the issue were totally back-end and invisible to the user, I would just commit it and no-one would be the wiser :). But what use is a feature with no UI access to it? So the questions are: 1. Any comments on the general idea? Too much? Too little? Leave it for after version 1 release? 2. What would a good UI dialog design look like? We seem to have a few problems maintaining all the platform-dependent dialog boxes as it is, how could we do this simply, cleanly, and not confuse the "church secretary?" Matti
