Re: status report

[John Darrington]

On Thu, Mar 05, 2009 at 09:39:47PM -0800, Ben Pfaff wrote:

     I think I'll start by implementing an "output viewer" window.  My
     first thought is that it should have two panes: on the left, a
     tree view with one row per procedure or other command, with each
     table or other output item nested as rows within its command; on
     the right, the full output so far rendered (with a new
     GTK+-specific output renderer) into a scrolling pane.  Clicking
     on a row in the left pane scrolls the right pane to that output
     item; right-clicking on an item in the right pane gives various
     options, e.g. "Export", "Copy" for an individual output item.
     The window would also have a menu that allows the entire output
     to be saved, exported to another format (HTML, PostScript, plain
     text to start), cleared, etc.
     
     I think that we can do most of this without rewriting the output
     backends.  Eventually I want to do that, but I think it's more
     important to have something more GUI-friendly working before
     then.


I'm not sure how this can work without at least some sort of
enhancement to the output generation, even if this is done at a high
level.  There will need to be some kind of out-of-band data to mark
the spots to jump to.  The obvious thing to use would be a
GtkTextMark.  It would be simple to add a mark each time
execute_syntax is called, but that wouldn't mark individual
proceduredures.

Other thoughts :

* If we want the marks to survive Save/Load, then we'll have to
  devise a way to encode them.

* As for exporting to HTML etc, if the input is the current plain
  text, the results aren't going to be very pleasing, I think.


However, such an exercise might be valuable if only to discover some
of the challenges that are going to arise from a more comprehensive
output system.




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