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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Hello,</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Don't know if I'll get much response to this
but I figured this is about the best place to try.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>I have an application I've been developing for some
time which is for organizing large amounts of information and publishing it to
the web. This application is written 100% in Python. (Below are
images of the application and the generated web page). It's not fancy, but
it works.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>My issue is with the Text widget and styling my
text/web pages. At first glance, the text widget appears amazing. It
seems to be able to do everything I want it to to be able to develop a reasonaly
decent looking document and web page with text styling and image
insertion. However, I've just not been able to get my mind around how to
use it as such. Consequently, I've resorted to a "mini language" (shown in
the image) which I must translate into HTML to format my document. It's
really a disappointing aspect of an otherwise nice application. Comparing
the document to the web page jpgs you can see that I"m using something of the
form [[ x ]]:unordered to transform 'x' into a level 2 header followed by an
unordered list with one element (preceded by <A
href="mailto:'@@'">'@@'</A>). I have quite a few of these kinds of things
for generating all sorts of HTML code. But I hate them. I want to be
able to remove this 'directives' and be able to view images and styles directly
in my document.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>I have played around with the Text widget
separately and developed a few 'sample' editing applications but I've never been
able to capture the functionality of what I need. Pictured also is a
control I wrote for an application which allows me to define text styles and
assign them to sections of text that's selected in my text widget. The
problem with this sample app is that in order to avoid the complexity of layered
styles whenever a section of text is assigned a new style all previous styles
(tags) on that section are first deleted. Layering of tags in itself
doesn't bother me but then you have to get into special cases for fonts (family,
size, weight and slant) which can't layer, but have to be specified at once. So,
if you want a button to select just bold on your GUI, you have to start to play
games to work around this. Also, I have not been able to figure out how to
change the style of text being typed. Seems like I have to type text
first, then go back, select it and assign a style. Then there's the who
issue of lists and tables which I need but am not really sure how to implement
in the control.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>For anyone curious, my tree is generated using the
Tix Tree widget. The elements in the tree are actually entry widgets so
that I can edit them inplace. I've implemented full editing capabilities
of the tree with drag-and-drop to allow reorganizing. The tree control is
very simple to use and those I've shown it to love it and describe it as
intuitive. There's only one minor problem with the Tree control involving
clicking on the +/- indicator. You need to click quickly to open or close
the branch, if your click and release of the mouse button is too slow, the the
branch state toggles twice putting you back in your original state.
Annoying, not sure I can fix it since it's behavior of the control.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>If anyone is interested in examining the
application I would be more than willing to zip the source code and email it to
them. It's not pretty as it's been through about a thousand
revisions.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Note of interest: The outline displayed in
the GUI and web page are for my research area, Logic. I have several
other outlines in the works including a Tkinter one that's quite
mature.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Thanks for any help.</FONT></DIV>
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