Application: An colorful tracking system for large, cooperative projects.
John A. Peters
This system atomatically "markes-up" the text as it is entered. Each
character is output to the screen in a color or font that is different
from the body of the work.
At the start of a session an author selects his perfered color, font
and size. Every character typed in that session will appear in his
chosen type style, unless he toggles this feature off.
This means that any changes that are made will stand out. This is
usefull for revewing the results of a session. It is also ustd to
prepair a presentation of changes for auditing by a committee or black
belt fourth programmer for acceptance.
I have prototyped this concept. I hand colored the changes to the file
before sending it out. The concept is a good one, but it's quite
laborious by hand. Here is a sample. Green is new text. Red shows
the deletions.
{Sorry the colors are not allowed here on CLF, see the real thing at
Win32...@Topica.com}
variable OVERSTRIKE \ new variable - toggle with insert key
: INSERT-CHARACTER ( char -- ) \ modified word replaces the original
browse?
IF drop
EXIT
THEN
delete-highlight
\ _insert-character
overstrike @
IF overstrike-character
ELSE _insert-character
THEN
?wrap-word
refresh-line ;
The easiest way to achieve this is by using a colorfull editor like
Microsoft word. Word has a save as option to save the source file as
an HTML file. Win32Fourth can compile HTML files via a small
modification to the console Forth that suitably ignores unneeded HTML
tags.
So far this means that you can use bold, underline, colors, fonts and
type sizes in your Forth source files. All these can be mixed in the
same document. However the engineer must add the colors and fonts by
hand until we modify the word processor.
The above does not acheve the goal of automatically differentiating
additions to the source code in real time, as you type.
In order for it to work automaically, one would need to modify the
source to the editor. For this reason I am looking in to a MS Word
clone called AbiWord from the Unix environment. It is a multi platform
Word clone that has source with it.
I found Abi Word here:
http://linux.oreillynet.com/pub/a/linux/2002/03/14/abiword.html
It looks very nice. They are establishing XML as AbiWord's native
file format and committing themselves to making the program
cross-platform. Here are some quotes from the web page.
"AbiWord's functionality and interface are awfully similar to Word's.
So has there been a conscious effort to make AbiWord an open source
version of Word? "From the beginning, Word was the target," admits
Sink.
Davis sums up the AbiWord team's design strategy as "more of a
'picking and choosing' what we like from Word, rather than trying to
reimplement the entire product as a whole."
This doesn't mean that AbiWord's development is limited to only the
features that Word has. For example, AbiWord was the first word
processor to save documents as XML files. It can export documents to
LaTeX and DocBook formats, but the present version of Word (the
2002/XP edition) isn't able to do this. Future versions of AbiWord
will also include vi/emacs bindings, something that will probably
never be seen in Word since it's a feature of interest to programmers
rather than casual users of a word processor."
I have cut this from GNU Free Software software.
AbiWord: Suggest Ideas
"Have an idea for a new feature or a change that would make AbiWord
better? We'd love to hear from you! Please submit the idea as a
feature request in bugzilla. This is exactly like reporting a Bug, the
only difference is that you put "Enhancement" as the Bug's severity.
And to help keep the Bug database up to date, you should also revisit
the Bug after creating it, and add the 'rfe' keyword. Once the idea is
in BugZilla, developers will see it and then they can go about
implementing it when they have the time."
Contracting AbiWord Work
"If you have a burning desire to see a specific feature added and are
not willing to wait for some random developer to pick it as a weekend
project, you are welcome to contact the developer list and offer to
pay someone for implementing the feature. Please prefix the subject of
such mails with [REWARD]. If you are lucky someone will bite, or at
the very least comment on the requested feature."
I am working on an experiment which is
1) Create Forth source in MS Word
2) Save it as HTML
3) Compile it in Win32Forth
So far 1 and 2 work.
Of course the compiler does not know about words like <HEAD> and so
on. So I open the file in WinEd, but some of the lines are v e r y
long. The long line is the one where I did a lot of font, color and
type size changes to test the concept.
John A. Peters
John A. Peters
jape...@pacbell.net (John A. Peters) wrote in message
>
> I am working on an experiment which is
> 1) Create Forth source in MS Word (or import a file from Forth)
> 2) Save it as HTML after coloring the changes and highlighting specials
> 3) Compile it in Win32Forth
> So far 1 and 2 work.
>
> Of course the compiler does not know about words like <HEAD> <bold> and so
> on. So I open the file in WinEd, but some of the lines are v e r y
> long. The long line is the one where I did a lot of font, color and
> type size changes to test the concept.
>
> John A. Peters
===================================================================
Alex McDonald (alex@rivadpm.-nospam-.com)
said
The original suggestion to parse out < ... > still leaves translation
of % char subs stuff like xyz%26 (xyz&). <snip>
Thanks, we really appreciate you help!
Did you find us on CLF or did you find us at
http://www.topica.com/lists/Win32Forth/
-- or did you send mail to --
win32...@topica.com
Robert Ackerman knows many languages and he feels confident that with
the help of your information he can modify the Forth interpreter to
handel these exceptions as well as all the <HTML> lables.
Since the interpreter is defered or vectored we can have a word such
as HLOAD for html or maybe XLOAD for xml files.
This will retain the interactive editorial abilitys that are so
wonderfully helpful when compiling new forth code. You now, poping in
to the editor with the cursor at the proper place.
JP