[haiku-development] Re: Text stuff in HaikuDepot
- From: Simon Taylor <simontaylor1@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 11 Dec 2013 08:40:21 +0000
Hi Stephan,
On 10 Dec 2013, at 20:37, Stephan Aßmus <superstippi@xxxxxx> wrote:
> Also, some feedback on the text framework I started would be nice. It's
> probably already a bit much to consume quickly. Even though its just a
> bare-bones start on the subject... Maybe something sticks out regardless and
> is worth commenting on, that would be nice. It's very incomplete in many
> places, but I am interested in comments on the general direction with the
> class layout and behavior.
I haven’t looked at either the code or the end-result in HaikuDepot, but have
been reading along with the commit messages.
My initial thought was that the use case in HaikuDepot is presumably primarily
read-only, and therefore I was expecting some form of BWebView to be the
easiest solution. AFAIK that’s the way Apple went with iTunes, at least on the
Desktop (along with some communication back from the web page to the native GUI
parts).
As far as a rich editing TextView is concerned, the biggest question for me is
where is the sweet spot for features between the current BTextView and what
would be needed by a full word processor / DTP application. I always liked the
live word wrapping in Gobe as you added shapes to the document, but imagine
that kind of feature is probably too much for an explicit “TextView” class.
Presumably at that level the entire content area of the window would be one
BView that would manage the rendering and layout of all the various elements on
the page.
Still I understand your interest in this kind of thing - I’ve always had a
vague feeling that I’d like to try my hand at writing some Office Suite style
apps, as they really don’t seem like they should be that complicated. Then I
glance at the .doc format documentation and get scared off :)
It feels to me like a WYSIWYG editor and a HaikuDepot view are too different to
be able to share much code, without overcomplicating HaikuDepot or
oversimplifying the editor. Maybe you’ve managed to design something that does
cover both cases though - I really should have looked at the code before
posting! For me just an improved BTextView with better layout possibilities and
a nicer API would be a great thing to have anyway, so I welcome all the work
you’ve done so far.
Simon
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