On Wed, 2001-12-19 at 11:41, Sean Crist wrote: > > Just an idea for the long-term dream list here. For more advanced users, > it would be nice to be able to create your own menu commands in AbiWord. > The general idea is that you can select a range of text, and choose your > user-defined menu command to pipe the text to some shell command (e.g. a > user-written Perl or Python script), with the text being returned by the > external program replacing the original text. > > If this were added, AbiWord would have to be coded defensively so that > invalid XML returned by the outside program is detected and not accepted. > > Perhaps AbiWord would invoke the shell command with arguments passing the > current selection range or insertion point, and would simply pipe the > whole document, leaving it up to the external program what use to make of > the selection range information. Or perhaps you specify in the command > building dialog whether to pipe just the selection or the whole document. > > This is, of course, a very Unix-centric way of doing things; it could > probably be done also e.g. in Windows, but not as gracefully. One of the > real strengths to this idea is that the whole community of users can > contribute features to AbiWord without having to learn all the internals > of the source code.
Actually, I'm working on a plugin to do something like this. I'll let you know when I'm done. Dom ----------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word unsubscribe in the message body.
