[haiku-development] Re: Styled Text, beyond R5 features

  • From: Truls Becken <truls.becken@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Sat, 15 May 2010 00:10:27 +0200

PulkoMandy wrote:

>> Definitely useful; the StyledText type is almost useless. It's just the
>> question which base format we should use internally.
>> Qt uses HTML for its text view AFAIR, but I'm not sure this is a good
>> idea. OTOH it's a somewhat simple format compared with ODF.
>> In any case, this is a welcomed effort!

Does the base format need to be a file format? Would it be a bad idea to simply 
use C++ classes to represent a document in memory? Something like 
HTextDocument, HTextChapter, HTextParagraph, HTextBulletList, etc.

It would certainly be more straight forward for an application to manipulate 
that than a buffer where the content is some random file format. Of course, one 
could always use for instance HTML DOM for this, but maybe one could more 
successfully capture the concepts that ought to be in a word processor by 
designing it without being too close to a single format?

> It depends on what one want to do : there is an important difference
> between style (font, colors), and actual structured text like html
> (headers, bullets, ...). odt does both, while html needs css for
> syling. Please, try not to mix them :)

I totally agree that the document style should be separate from the content. 
Whenever I have to use Word, I get the feeling that its model is completely 
broken. Paste something that is not plain text, and it tries to bring over the 
font and size. Sadly, most word processors copy this way of working, so 
everybody is used to this being the norm. Something like LaTeX, where you don't 
spend your time fiddling with page breaks and font styles, is clearly superior. 
Write your content, apply the enterprise or project's official stylesheet, 
success.

-Truls

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