Subject: Re: Commit: template support
From: Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Date: Tue Nov 06 2001 - 16:46:33 CST
At 03:39 PM 11/6/01 -0500, Dom Lachowicz wrote:
>> As a matter of general principle, this is really, really great. Thanks.
>
>Thanks :)
I'm thrilled, too -- if I'd realized the initial patch was *that* easy, I'd
have done so long ago. :-)
>I'm going to make so that we *still* install the global template file,
>but on Unix we also check for a ~/.AbiSuite/templates/normal.awt first.
>I hope that this sounds reasonable to you and I hope to have this done
>in a little bit. It's on my radar now.
My thoughts exactly. In fact, why not make this an XP behavior, like we do
with custom dictionaries? If we get the "overlay" semantics right -- for
example, via a simple file-name match -- then users can "restore" to the
default (read-only) templates by blowing away their custom template files.
>Using AbiWord to open the normal.awt file, wherever it may lie, doesn't
>sound too difficult of an operation to me, and as a user (I actually do
>use AbiWord quite a lot) I wouldn't mind doing this. However, I'd love
>to hear suggestions as to what we should do to make this easier,
>especially because it'd be totally trivial to implement.
Coming up with UI ideas should be easy. I've certainly seen a diverse set
of ways to handle this in other products -- many of them bad. ;-) The hard
part is working through the usability implications of various alternative
UIs to work out all the kinks. For one proposal, see:
http://www.abisource.com/mailinglists/abiword-dev/01/May/0363.html
Thus, here are some proposed goals for a full-strength UI. Feel free to
scale them back to something more practical.
1. Locating existing templates to apply is easy.
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For example, I forget what the File/New dialog is supposed to look like (not
implemented yet on Win32), but that's an obvious place to display all
relevant templates. Unfortunately, using the "overlay" approach means that
you may have two sources of templates to consider -- the stock ones
installed, and any per-user customizations.
Off the cuff, I'm not sure how to reuse the standard file/open dialog and
still meet this goal. Perhaps you mirror the entire standard install the
first time any template gets modified or something. Or we could have a more
complex custom dialog for that purpose.
2. Updating existing templates "to match" is easy.
---------------------------------------------------
For example, I think Word has an "auto-update" setting of some sort, which
has the semantics roughly like the following:
Anytime you update a style definition based on a template, those changes
can also be applied to the underlying template with one click.
Randy and David are probably more familiar with the exact details than I am,
but I think you just get a dialog when closing the app or the document
confirming whether you want to save those changes to normal.awt as well.
3. Templates "magically" save to the right place.
--------------------------------------------------
For example, the Save dialog for an .awt file could just default to the
appropriate user-specific directory. Likewise, if you convert an existing
file somewhere else into a template, it might help to ask the user if they
want to save it in the standard location instead.
4. Creating new templates is easy.
-----------------------------------
File/New .abt plus #3 above should take care of that.
5. Locating existing templates to edit isn't too bad.
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This depends on what File/New looks like. If that's a standard File/Open
dialog, then the directory is discoverable. Otherwise, if the directory
used isn't visible, then *that* dialog may need some sort of "edit this
template" option.
Paul
PS: The more we do to mirror Word's handling of normal.dot and other
templates, the more likely it is that we can *use* those templates. ;-)
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