julian@osu-eddie.UUCP (Julian Gomez) (10/06/85)
Word processing programs like Macwrite need a push ruler operation, so
that it's convenient to do a text display in the middle of a document.
Right now you have to insert two rulers around the display, then fix
the first of those. However, if for some reason you decide to change
the overall format of the document, you have to go through the whole
thing and fix every second ruler to correspond to the new main format.
There are lots of obvious problems with this kind of approach. Better
is to have push and pop rulers, which will do what's wanted while
avoiding these problems.
While we're at it, it would be nice if Macwrite had a tagged indented
paragraph like you can do with ".ip" in nroff -me.
Feel free to use these ideas if you want (especially you, Apple!).
--
"If Chaos himself sat umpire, what better could he do?"
Julian "a tribble took it" Gomez
Computer Graphics Research Group, The Ohio State University
{ucbvax,decvax}!cbosg!osu-eddie!juliansbm@arthur (Steven B. Munson) (10/08/85)
In article <647@osu-eddie.UUCP>, julian@osu-eddie.UUCP (Julian Gomez) writes: > ... > While we're at it, it would be nice if Macwrite had a tagged indented > paragraph like you can do with ".ip" in nroff -me. I agree that MacWrite badly needs a push/pop-ruler mechanism, but I thought it might be of general interest to know that MacWrite is already capable of doing indented paragraphs, a la .ip in -me. If you push the little paragraph indentation marker in the ruler to the left of the left margin, the first line of the paragraph will have a tag indented to the left of the left margin. A tab gets you back to the left margin to type the paragraph body. If the tag is longer than the indentation, I think you have to use return and then a tab. Steve Munson sbm@Purdue.EDU sbm@Purdue.CSNET
julian@osu-eddie.UUCP (Julian Gomez) (10/12/85)
> I agree that MacWrite badly needs a push/pop-ruler mechanism, but I > thought it might be of general interest to know that MacWrite is already > capable of doing indented paragraphs, a la .ip in -me. If you push the > little paragraph indentation marker in the ruler to the left of the left > margin, the first line of the paragraph will have a tag indented to the > left of the left margin. A tab gets you back to the left margin to type > the paragraph body. If the tag is longer than the indentation, I think you > have to use return and then a tab. This is how they tell you to do it in the manual. The nice thing about .ip in nroff -me is that it takes care of doing the line break if necessary, instead of making the user worry about it (what are computers for anyway?). Actually, if you think about it, indented paragraphs are a particular instance of the push/pop ruler problem. -- "If Chaos himself sat umpire, what better could he do?" Julian "a tribble took it" Gomez Computer Graphics Research Group, The Ohio State University {ucbvax,decvax}!cbosg!osu-eddie!julian