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List:       koffice-devel
Subject:    Re: Template Wizard in dcop
From:       Thomas Zander <zander () planescape ! com>
Date:       2002-02-26 10:02:52
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On Mon, Feb 25, 2002 at 08:32:38PM +0000, Chris Howells wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Reading kde-cvs I've been quite fascinated with the way in which dcop 
> interfaces have been added to various places in KOffice. I don't know a great 
> deal about dcop at the moment (I'm going to read up on it tonight :)), but I 
> presume that I could do something like tell KWord "I want a table 3 rows by 3 
> columns on line x" and it could do it?
> 
> If so, I would quite like to work on some kind of templates wizard, a bit like 
> the page wizards in MS Publisher.
> 
> The way I'm thinking is some kind of extensible wizard (based on KWizard?) 
> that would ask the user relevant options for the kind of document they were 
> creating e.g. for business cards, you'd be asked the name, address, phone 
> number, etc.
> 
> Does this sound like a good idea? :) Does anybody have any ideas how some kind 
> of generic template framework (based on XML files to describe?) could be put 
> in place to implement wizards?

My thoughts on this subject are that I would like to see general macros in KWord.
Where you can 'plug' in a list of macros (either coming with the distro or user-
installed). A new 'macro' menu would seem appropriate. Think along the lines of a 
macro that would add a nice layout to a table or a page. But (almost) anything is 
possible.

Using that as a base your idea would probably be better to do with using a set 
of macro's that get arguments. The wizard than embeds a number of macro-GUIs 
one after another. (maybe with specially made macros for that wizard, but they
can be used seperately!)

In that world I don't like the templates analogy very much. Keep one way of 
providing templates; not two. The wizard would be much better for changing an 
allready created page.

-- 
Thomas Zander                                            zander@earthling.net
The only thing worse than failure is the fear of trying something new

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