Re: GUI tasks

[Ben Pfaff]

John Darrington <address@hidden> writes:

> On Fri, Jul 21, 2006 at 09:21:01PM -0700, Ben Pfaff wrote:
>      First: should we file each of these as a separate Task on
>      Savannah?  They seem to be well-separated.
>
> We could do that.  Or add a GUI category to the bug tracker and file
> them as wishlist bugs.

Well, if either one sounds attractive to you, then I'd encourage
you to go ahead and do it.

>      I actually think your icons are not so bad.  I hope they don't
>      look like the SPSS icons, by the way: that seems like it could be
>      a copyright issue.
>
> Indeed I did look at the spss window to get some inspiration.  So they
> do look similar (except the weights icons which I thought was too
> ornate).  As a matter of fact all the other icons (from the Gtk+
> library) look almost identical to those use by spss. Eg: File Open,
> Save, Print etc.  
>
> I am not a lawyer, but my understanding of the Berne Convention is
> that concepts and ideas (which is what icons are meant to portray)
> cannot be copyrighted.  If you're concerned about this we can ask for
> advice from the FSF staff.

I think it'd be better if we asked.  Do you happen to know the
proper email address to ask?

>      > Online Manual
>      > =============
>      > I was suprised to find that there is no GtkWidget to display Info
>      > files.  But it  wouldn't be too difficult to make one.  Then a online
>      > reference manual would be easy.
>      
>      I don't think that Info is a very good way to present an online
>      manual, outside of a terminal or another context that requires
>      fixed-width fonts.  You can't usefully adjust the width of a
>      window displaying an Info manual.
>
> It's strange that no existing info viewer manages this properly.
> There's no reason why a viewer couldn't fold each paragraph into a
> single line, and apply it's own formatting.  This would seem almost
> trivial to do.   I suppose it's a historical thing; at one time, that
> might have been too much overhead for the the viewer.

I doubt that's the real reason: it's pretty easy and, as you say,
low-overhead.  In my humble opinion, the likely real reason is
that there is not enough information in an Info document to
decide which paragraphs may be reflowed and which are meant to be
fixed-width (e.g. examples).  Also, there's a lot of information
about fonts, etc., that gets lost in the Texinfo->Info
translation.  To display a Texinfo documentation in a pretty
fashion on a bitmapped display, it makes more sense to use an
intermediate format that does a better job of preserving
semantics, such as HTML, XML, DocBook, whatever.

>      I'd suggest using "makeinfo --html" to convert the manual to HTML
>      and then displaying the HTML in a control instead.
>
> That would also be a possibility.  However, whilst there are some
> libaries for displaying HTML in a widget, they all tend to be *huge*,
> and rather cumbersome.

GNOME has the Yelp help browser that seems it might be worth a
look:
        http://www.gnome.org/learn/users-guide/latest/yelp.html 

>      > Cut/Paste
>      > =========
>      > The ability to cut and paste data between two running Psppire
>      > instances would be nice.  But probably more usefull would be the
>      > ability to paste from Gnumeric.  It shouldn't be too difficult.
>      
>      Also, perhaps, to cut and paste between comma or tab separated
>      data and Psppire?
>
> Well Gnumeric can load both comma and tab seperated data.  It doesn't
> seem intuitive to cut and paste csv, because one would not normally
> want the commas to be pasted.  I would have thought that GET TRANSLATE
> would be the prefered option there.

OK.
-- 
"If a person keeps faithfully busy each hour of the working day, he
 can count on waking up some morning to find himself one of the
 competent ones of his generation."
--William James