I took a brainstorming session today on this issue and I would like to
add some of my thinking to this discussion:
- I now believe that flags are a less than optimal idea
-- they add to much complexity (many flags necessary to do something
more complex)
-- they limit the things that could be done only to those for which
flags do exist, and only in a pre-specified way
-- every reference has to be set individually, and, most important,
wishing to change the formatting has to be done on all those references
(there is NO mechanism to do it globally)
e.g. in the medical literature, references are often cited as a
superscript number (as [2], or simply 2, but superscript).
Now consider the following sentence: "Further details can be found in
reference 2." We need another flag to specify that 2 is NOT superscript,
and another that it is NOT enclosed in brackets (IF the initial format
would have been [2]).
The problem gets more complex if more than one reference are cited. e.g.
"Further details can be found in references 2, 3 and 4." This could have
been represented as (superscript) 2, 3, 4 or 2-4 (of course with/ w/o
brackets and various other combinations).
What I think is necessary is a *more flexible way* to cover various
coding possibilities. Flags just don't seem the right solution.
*My Vision of a flexible Solution*
Instead of coding flags, I would propose to have one byte (or a global
flag) that stores the class name (or number) of the *formatting scheme*.
In other words:
- allow the text to contain more than one formatting schemes
- NO formatting scheme flag set (or class set to 0): use the default,
the master formatting
- allow user to define additional formatting schemes, like:
-- scheme 1: drop author:: [year]
-- scheme 2: drop year, allow chapter: (Author in chapter)
-- these schemes should be fully customizable, exactly as the default
scheme;
-- so these schemes are much more powerful than the flag-options
-- they are stored globally, too, so the user does NOT need to view
every reference IF he decides to change later the formatting BUT can do
it globally, in a very flexible way
I also believe, this is more easy to implement. NO extra flags, just
additional styles. The style engine becomes more simple.
Just my thoughts. And of course provide a field 'caption', IF the user
wants to manually change the text to be displayed. This field will store
that text, and, as long there is text in this field, this text will be
displayed inside the document. Automatic updating is NO longer possible,
BUT OOo Writer could identify any entries that have changed, so the user
can manually change them again.
Regards,
Leonard Mada
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