Re: GUI tasks

[John Darrington]

On Fri, Jul 21, 2006 at 09:21:01PM -0700, Ben Pfaff wrote:
     First: should we file each of these as a separate Task on
     Savannah?  They seem to be well-separated.

We could do that.  Or add a GUI category to the bug tracker and file
them as wishlist bugs.

     I actually think your icons are not so bad.  I hope they don't
     look like the SPSS icons, by the way: that seems like it could be
     a copyright issue.

Indeed I did look at the spss window to get some inspiration.  So they
do look similar (except the weights icons which I thought was too
ornate).  As a matter of fact all the other icons (from the Gtk+
library) look almost identical to those use by spss. Eg: File Open,
Save, Print etc.  

I am not a lawyer, but my understanding of the Berne Convention is
that concepts and ideas (which is what icons are meant to portray)
cannot be copyrighted.  If you're concerned about this we can ask for
advice from the FSF staff.

     > Online Manual
     > =============
     > I was suprised to find that there is no GtkWidget to display Info
     > files.  But it  wouldn't be too difficult to make one.  Then a online
     > reference manual would be easy.
     
     I don't think that Info is a very good way to present an online
     manual, outside of a terminal or another context that requires
     fixed-width fonts.  You can't usefully adjust the width of a
     window displaying an Info manual.

It's strange that no existing info viewer manages this properly.
There's no reason why a viewer couldn't fold each paragraph into a
single line, and apply it's own formatting.  This would seem almost
trivial to do.   I suppose it's a historical thing; at one time, that
might have been too much overhead for the the viewer.
     
     I'd suggest using "makeinfo --html" to convert the manual to HTML
     and then displaying the HTML in a control instead.

That would also be a possibility.  However, whilst there are some
libaries for displaying HTML in a widget, they all tend to be *huge*,
and rather cumbersome.
     
     > Cut/Paste
     > =========
     > The ability to cut and paste data between two running Psppire
     > instances would be nice.  But probably more usefull would be the
     > ability to paste from Gnumeric.  It shouldn't be too difficult.
     
     Also, perhaps, to cut and paste between comma or tab separated
     data and Psppire?

Well Gnumeric can load both comma and tab seperated data.  It doesn't
seem intuitive to cut and paste csv, because one would not normally
want the commas to be pasted.  I would have thought that GET TRANSLATE
would be the prefered option there.


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