Hi Neil,
Your idea crossed my mind when I started to use scribble,
but I don't think I know enough of Scribble,
(let alone HTML etc) for such a task.
I hardly have experience in making Guis.
I am a simple, but very content user of Racket.
Thanks to you and all others of PLT,
Jos

-----Original Message-----
From: Neil Van Dyke [mailto:n...@neilvandyke.org] 
Sent: sábado, 29 de abril de 2017 23:25
To: Jos Koot; 'Racket Users'
Subject: student project idea: semi-WYSIWYG Scribble editor (Was: Racket 6.9)

If some undergrad wanted a summer programming project... make a 
semi-WYSIWYG editor for Scribble documents.

You might have a long scrolling text window, in which things like 
boldface/italics/color/textsize that Scribble would render are editable 
text, and Scribble markup itself doesn't appear on-screen. Things like 
print pagination probably would not appear here, though, but you'll want 
to special-case what normally ends up as rendered Table of Contents, for 
navigation purposes.  This can be tricky, especially if you're not 
closed-world to a particular set of Scribble primitives, but let the 
user extend it with arbitrary constructs layered atop those (but you 
could avoid intractability situations by always preserving the structure 
the user specifies, and only going to WYSIWYG-ish display&editing when 
you can determine (programmatically) how the text in the renderer 
relates to the text of the construct arguments.

Alternatively, and simpler: you might have two window panes, one in 
which the user writes Scribble source, and another that gives an 
almost-live semi-WYSIWYG view of how the source would render. Ideally 
have the semi-WYSIWYG one approximate UI cues like text cursor point and 
selection highlighting in the semi-WYSIWG view.

You could start with the latter, and then later implement the former as 
an alternative mode that user could switch to/from dynamically. This 
development path would certainly make your GUI-based selection of 
regions for arbitrary extensible Scribble constructs, and traceability 
of text between constructs and semi-WYSIWYG, easier to debug. :)

You might decide to implement this within the DrRacket framework, which 
includes a bunch of GUI and support stuff that you'll need anyway, 
beyond what the Racket `gui` packages provide.


Jos Koot wrote on 04/29/2017 05:00 PM:
[...]
> Indeed I like WYSIWYG,
> but nowadays I use scribble too (most scribble/manual)
> (frequently rendering in order to see what I get and
> looking into the docs in order to see how to get what I want)
> A very nice thing of scribble is that you can make
> elaborate procedures and syntax transformers,
> much easier to write and more flexible and reliable
> than Java macros in MS-word, I think.
> And, of course, the @interaction[] and companions,
> which I don't have in MS-word.
[...]

-- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups 
"Racket Users" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email 
to racket-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

Reply via email to