A major feature required for "corporate" use of Word Processors is
Revision Marks. The idea is that multiple authors of a document can have
their contributions tracked, rejected/accepted. It is a feature we must
have to compete with MS Word and StarOffice.
These meta-data fields are a great start to this.
I've been thinking about how to do these and I think that they could be
implemented with a simple meta-property "author" that is attached to all
piecetable changes during an editting session. ie Every piecetable frag
has an additional attribute - "author:........". Then layouts can be
built with different authors showing up as different colors.
We then write a simple non-modal dialog to browse a document that shows
the author of a particular segment and the option to reject/merge the
contribution into the main text by simply changing the value of the
"athor:..." attribute.
Is this what you're working on Dom? If not, is anyone interested in taking
this on? I'd be happy to help out but I have got time to drive this.
There will be additional work required of course but I think the basic
concept can be implemented rather easily.
Plus Miguel promised to buy me a beer once AbiWord did these :-)
Cheers
Martin
