ShadowWrite 1.2 ideas

[taob@r-node.hub.org (Brian Tao)]

    This version of ShadowWrite has great potential, Andre!  :)  One
problem that must be immediately remedied though... a couple SW menus do
not show up properly when Kangaroo/Hierarchic are present!  The "File"
menu rectangle shrinks down to about three lines deep by only a couple
dozen pixels wide.  The "Document" menu draws the contents of the menu
(i.e., "Text Info..." and "Untitled") plus some garbage pixels, but not
the menu rectangle itself!  The contents are "left behind" when I let go
of the mouse button, messing up the screen underneath.  It's rather
difficult to describe, but just try it with Kangaroo and Hierarchic
installed.

    The ruler is a great idea, I'm glad you put it in!  Some ideas:

  o I would like to see variable-spacing tabs
  o Don't forget to insert the default tab stops (I don't see any in
    this version, but I guess that was your intent)
  o Buttons for single/1.5/double spacing
  o Up/down arrows for changing the line spacing one pixel at a time
  o Draggable left/right margin and indent markers
  o Pop-up colour menu (one menu, but hold down Option to select bg
    colour)

    In other words, all options in the "Set Ruler..." dialog should be
accessible through icons on the ruler.  The dialog should stay if you
want precise numerical values.  BTW, the values in the dialog should
reflect the units of measure selected.

    More suggestions:

  o How about making "Load File..." MultiGet as well?
  o A key equivalent for "Save As..." (Apple-Shift-S, perhaps?)
  o "Write..." and "Write As..." menu items for automatically saving as
    text files (rather than having to select "Save As...", clicking the
    radio button, then Save)
  o "Default file type" pop-up menu in Preferences.  I tend to save a
    lot of stuff as plain text rather than Teach.
  o An "OK" button in Preferences in case the user doesn't want to save
    the changes (i.e., settings stay only until the NDA is closed)
  o A real Apple menu (with a real Apple icon and a list of NDA's)
  o "Beautify Text" option in "Modify Text..."; changes regular quotes
    and apostrophes into their smart/curly counterparts, a double hyphen
    into an em dash (option-shift-hyphen), (c) (r) (tm) into their
    respective trademark symbols, etc., etc.
  o "Unbeautify Text" option to undo all the above
  o "Paragraph Format" option like in the Proterm editor to turn lines
    into whole paragraphs.  Also "Line Format" to go the other way.
  o The warning when saving as a text file should simply read "No style
    information will be saved!"
  o Auto-save feature (either by time interval or by number of
    keystrokes)
  o Automatic smart quotes (related to "Beautify Text", but does it
    on-the-fly as you type)
  o Make the Open/Load dialog wider, Kangaroo doesn't have enough room!
  o "Append..." menu item to append the buffer to an existing file
  o An "Undo" menu command!!!
  o A "Quit" menu item, just to be consistent with everything else
  o A "Purge Styles..." menu item in "Document" to rebuild the
    rStyleBlock resource which tends to grow larger and larger when
    doing extensive editing on Teach documents.  I do this manually by
    copying the entire document to the Clipboard, opening a new
    document, and pasting it back in.  This can save several K of space.
  o Key equivalents for text styles (Apple-Shift-B for bold,
    Apple-Shift-I for italic, etc.)
  o I can't get the ruler to display in points (only inches and
    centimeters)
  o Add "pixels" as a unit of measure
  o The ruler markings should reflect the printer driver settings (i.e.,
    90 dpi vs. 72 dpi using a Harmonie driver)
  o Calculate/show page breaks
  o Set top/bottom margins in inches/cm/points/pixels/whatever

    That's about all I can think of for now, Andre.  Looking forward to
seeing the final version!
-- 
Brian Tao:: taob@r-node.hub.org (r-Node BBS, 416-249-5366, FREE!)
::::::::::: 90taobri@wave.scar.utoronto.ca (University of Toronto)
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