From: Tomas Frydrych (tomas@frydrych.uklinux.net)
Date: Sun May 26 2002 - 13:14:16 EDT
> How does the UI for a document with multiple authors work? Can you
> associate a revision number and color with a particular author?
First I should define some terminology I will use below: "change" --
an arbitrary change in the document (insertion, delete, fmt change);
"revision" -- a set of linked changes. A change is expressed by
setting a revision attribute of a fragment of the document, while
revisions are listed in the <revisions></revisions> section of the
document.
Each change carries with it a numerical id which associates it with
other changes forming a single revision. The id is assigned
automatically when you turn the revisions mode on. If the
document does not contain any revisions listed in the <revisions>
section, the id is set to 1 and you get an option to add a comment
that will be stored in the <revisions> section. If the document
already contains revisions when you turn the revisions mode on,
you get the option of choosing whether you want to continue the
last revision in the document or start a new one; in the latter case
the id is += 1 to the highest revision present so far (and you again
can add a comment).
Each numerical id has a colour assigned to it; there are predefined
colours for the first 9 revisions and everything else becomes pure
red (there are no reasons why there could not be more colours, or
possibly even user-defined colours, but I doubt either would be very
useful in real life).
Strictly speaking a revision is authorless, it could be produced by a
single author or more authors; what sets it appart from other
revisons from the user's point of view is the comment added by the
original author of the revision. If you want to have author specific
revisions then each author needs to start a new revision and put
their name into the comment.
Once a new revision is started, the previous revisions are "closed"
for good, i.e., they cannot be resumed. So if you create a revision
#1 in a document and then pass it onto someone else who starts a
revision #2, you will not be able to resume revision #1 when you get
the doc back; you can either resume revision #2 or start a revision
#3. This is simply because when viewed cumulatively changes
found in revision #1 will be "overruled" by revision #2, so resuming
revision #1 with #2 already in place would mean that your changes
to anything revised by #2 would have no effect.
You can see the revisions present in the document and the
associated comments by Tools->Revisions->Select revision. The
main purpose of the dialog is to allow the user to single out a
particular revision and hide all other revisions from view, but that
does not work yet.
Tomas
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