Re: [xmlroff] FO and Area Tree browser proposal

[Tony G. <Ton...@Su...>]

Charles Bozeman wrote at  6 Mar 2003 19:53:44 -0600:
 > I think this is an excellent idea especially your idea of seeing the
 > formated output in one pane and the FO and properties in another. I am

The formatted output is an eventual option.  I'm proposing to start
with just the trees, which will be simpler to implement.

 > discovering that it is difficult to determine if a fo has been rendered
 > correctly; even a small fo has a lot of complexities. I also like the
 > idea of having loadable modules to work at different stages of
 > formatting. I can image not only being able to choose different output
 > formats but also having a choice different algorithms during the
 > adjustment phase.

xmlroff currently doesn't do loadable modules.  It doesn't do loadable
modules for the output format simply because there's currently only
one supported output format.

My intention has always been to have loadable modules for the
adjustment phase to allow, as you say, a choice of different
algorithms during the adjustment phase.

 > I've never worked on a GUI application before and I image this one is
 > not too easy, but I'll bet it will pay off in the long run.

GTK+ (and GNOME) has a tree widget.  It seems to me that it would be
straightforward to walk the FO tree or the area tree and make a
corresponding GTK+ tree.  Having made the GTK+ tree from the FO or
area tree, it should be easy to get from a selected widget in the GTK+
tree to the corresponding FoFo or FoArea, and you can get from an FoFo
to its areas or from an FoArea to its FoFo easily enough.  After that,
it's "just" a matter of updating the appropriate windows and selecting
the appropriate widgets.

Presumably the GUI builders such as the Glade application will make
the GUI side easy to implement.

Regards,


Tony Graham
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