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hello again

i am reading the user manual and thinking about the functions texmacs
provides. some things are quite more clear to me now. for example,
C-backspace helped a lot in getting rid of redundant outlines. thanks
also for the other tips. however, there is always space for
improvement. i swear that, next time, i'll first go through the archive
of the developers' mailinglist before i post about improvements. but,
this time, i felt that i could forget what i wanted to say in the
meantime.

i was re-thinking what i wrote about the handling of the cursor
movement. i still find it annoying that i have to watch if my cursor
jumped into an outline to be shure that the next input belongs to the
right sequence and appears in the right format. if texmacs would behave
like a flow-oriented editor, which always chooses a default rule to
select the right dependency, but allows me to 'connect' my input to a
neighboured sequence manually by case, this would be more logical
to me. to make this more clear: think of a line of text that begins
normally formatted and then changes to bold. the cursor is positioned
right at the borderline between the two differently formatted sequences.
texmacs decides by default to append new input at the left sequence
and with its settings. now, if i press C-right, the cursor is logically
'connected' to the bold sequence at the right. if i press C-left, the
opposite is valid. possibly, if one presses C-up, a new sequence with
the default settings of the document is fit in and, if one presses
C-down, the current sequence is deleted. this is also nice for deleting
whole paragraphs. in consequence, the visual outlining can be made
modal. what you think?

i was also thinking about the overall presence of texmacs. deep
menue structures are quite annoying and taking much time. however,
switching to dialogs is also annoying. I personally like the 'modern'
card-style. this is based on free layout though, and possibly not what
can be realized in the near future. however, thinking about HTML, XUL
or, nevertheless, the windows help browser (basing on RTF files), the
native texmacs file-format already supports all the neccessary features
for a nicer and better integrated way of providing user interaction
except of, i think, some gui widgets like check, radio, and select
boxes, which can be taken from the toolkit. these dialog-like documents
would be editable with texmacs itself and thus includeable like
chapters to a book.

the idea is to have these interactive documents connected to the
texmacs configuration via tags and to display them like any other
document. they are not shown in extra windows but scrolling down from
the button bar of the texmacs main window. this said, the buttons (or
the menue's main entries) are the triggers that call the single entry
documents. further subdocs are called by the entry documents via the
already implemented browser mode. the dialogs/documents are laid over
the working document to not cause a redraw. configurations done may be
directly visible in the working document though.

even if you want to follow different plans, this version may be a third
alternative to menues and dialogs. i find it very senseful if you want
to keep a certain niveau on different (ancient unix) platforms.

btw., there's a free grammer checker, which seems to work quite well
for abiword:

http://www.abisource.com/downloads/link-grammar/

regards,
dennis

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• some thoughts, also to the new gui-overhaul, Dennis Heuer, 11/27/2007

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