User:Maury Markowitz/Manifesto for a Better Word Processor/What sort of document views do we need?
I'm not sure how much discussion is needed here, this is one article that will likely turn into a feature list.
- text editor mode - all page layout disappears, along with headers and footers. character/paragraph styles remain (??).
- WYSIWYG - I loved the one in MacWrite, the "floating pages". Anyone have any other good examples? IIRC Pages does this well.
- continuous pages - similar to the basic mode in Word, but hopefully not as dambed ugly. Basically similar to WYSIWYG, but the area around the page disappears.
- n-up - gotta have this. With 30" monitors out there, don't think "2-up", think "n-up"!
One of the complaints about FullWrite was that the various markers could only be seen in specific views. For instance, one could not see both outlines and change bars. So let's make all of these things optional...
- change bars -- need to figure this out, there're not useful if there's 50 edits
- line numbers
- section/chapter/paragraph/etc. numbers
- invisibles - tabs, returns, etc.
- sticky notes
Reveal Codes
[edit]I really liked WordPerfect's "Reveal Codes" feature. In a pure WYSIWYG editor it is often hard to see why a certain section of text is formatting in some strange way. When you can see the offending codes, you can delete them, or select and copy the good ones to another document.
Those who are comfortable editing HTML source code have a similar benefit, if the HTML is not so complicated that you can no longer see what's going on. So IMHO the ideal document processor should show -- and store on disk -- readable ASCII instructions conceptually similar to HTML or wiki markup. The codes could be in one window while the WYSIWYG result could be in another window allowing the user to instantly see the effect of every action. 72.208.56.148 14:23, 8 September 2007 (UTC)
File Save
[edit]Someone recently asked a question that becomes glaringly obvious once you think about it. We are no longer using computers with two floppy disks. But we still use behaviors left over from those times, such as saving our files to disk every now and then. Why shouldn't every keystroke be written to disk the second you type it? Indeed if the disk had nothing more than a log of actions applied to the (originally empty) document, you would have every previous version of the document in one file and yet it still might be a lot smaller than the bloated 3-megabyte-per-page files some document software produces. Why should it take 10,000 bytes to store a document containing 100 keystrokes?
I realize this suggestion is somewhat in conflict with the suggestion to store ASCII markup on disk in a format similar to HTML, but submit both for discussion and consideration. 72.208.56.148 14:23, 8 September 2007 (UTC)