On Wed, 27 Sep 2000, John Levon wrote:
> On Tue, 26 Sep 2000, Dekel Tsur wrote:
>
> > Designing a XForms dialog with fdesign was always a tedious task,
> > which is why there are new features with no GUI support (for example:
> > per-paragraph spacing). With the GUII, the situation is worse, as the GUI work
> > is needed to be repeated 3 times (or even more in the future).
I wouldn't have thought it was any more tedious than any other gui
designer. But then again maybe I'm used to using it.
> > So, I want to suggest a new approach for doing GUII dialogs:
> > The dialogs structure and logiv will be defined by in a simple text file,
> > and the dialogs will be built in run-time from these files.
> > An example for this approach can be seen in Kaptain
> > (http://www.hszk.bme.hu/~tz124/kaptain/) which is a "universal graphical
> > front-end for command line programs". See
> > http://www.hszk.bme.hu/~tz124/kaptain/docs/enscript.html
> > for an example.
> >
> > In addition to easier maintenance, it will also add new abilities like the
> > ability to define new insets with text files, and the ability to load
> > various latex packages and set their parameters using a GUI dialog.
> >
>
> I'm sceptical it would be simple to do this in a way that would suit all
> the frontends. Remember Kaptain is for a specific GUI toolkit.
In the early days of GUII (1997-98) several ideas were discussed. We
decided we really wanted to work on LyX and not write our own
cross-platform toolkit -- cross-platform toolkits at the time were fairly
lame and that's argueably still the case: the best toolkit for Windows is
still MFC like it or not. If you write a dialog design in some arbitrary
format (eg. XML) you also need to write a dialog code generator for each
and every platform we want to support. In other words a cross-platform
toolkit. You can develop a cross-platform toolkit if you want but I'd
rather you continued your excellent work on LyX (besides you know know
more about multi-language documents than the rest of us put together).
> And as Lars points out they shouldn't be the same design anyway - the
> environments have different ways of doing things anyway
Another good point. We're already seeing many interesting ideas springing
up from the three existing toolkits and we've only got about half a dozen
dialogs on all platforms so far.
Allan. (ARRae)
