[IAEP] Adding a word-count to write

[Martin Sevior]

Hi Gary,

Nice screen shot! The toolbars look very easy to understand and easy
use to me. Unfortunately I can't really give much of a critique
because it's hard for me to think like a primary-school child now :-)

Plus I've seen some kids absolutely fly through learning how to use a
computer so even AbiWord's full on gui is accessible rather quickly
anyway.

Just to let you know, one new feature in AbiWord-2.8  we really should
expose to Write are annotations. These will be very useful for
teachers to comment and correct submitted work from children.

Giving full control over annotations within the context of  Write's
simplified toolbar will be a challenge and it would be great to get
feedback on exactly which parts of an an annotation feature should be
provided.

Cheers!

Martin

On Sun, Jul 19, 2009 at 12:44 PM, Gary C Martin<gary at garycmartin.com> wrote:
> Hi Martin,
>
> On 18 Jul 2009, at 22:58, Martin Sevior wrote:
>
>> We do not expose the underlying code to extract the numeric value of
>> the word count from a document at present. It would trivial to add
>> that to the API if there was consensus this would be a useful thing to
>> do. Now is a good time to put in such requests because we're just
>> finishing off the 2.8 release.
>>
>> However you can pop up the AbiWord modeless Word Count dialog by doing:
>>
>> self._abiword_canvas.invoke_cmd("dlgWordCount","",0,0)
>
> Thanks. Just added this as a toolbar button to test. For those interested,
> here's what it looks like in Sugar. With Sugars fullscreen interface design,
> the use of dialogues is rather finicky as it's easy to loose the dialogue
> behind to the desktop background layer:
>
>
>
>
>> This will give you document statistics as you type.
>>
>> I can imagine that having the word count auto-updating in the toolbar
>> would be a neat little feature
>> for the Write 0.86. It might one of those "high ceiling" features for
>> users to discover.
>>
>> One might also think of "find", "replace" and "goto" all being
>> implemented in the toolbar.
>
> FWIW, "find" is available under the Edit tab (but no "replace"
> functionality), and "goto" (page) is available on the View tab (but not goto
> line number).
>
>> We have to careful to remember our target audience though.
>
> +1 I think it took some strong restraint to keep the number of features
> exposed down to what we see today in Write :-)
>
> If you have the time – I've been looking for feedback on a new Toolbar
> design that may be arriving in some form for Sugar 0.86. Some of the goals
> are to show the "Stop" activity button at all times (kids often get lost in
> the text tabs); resolve the difficulty of small click targets caused by the
> narrow height text tabs; use icons rather than relying on text tab names
> (lower age, and improved non-illiterate access):
>
>  http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Design_Team/Proposals/Toolbars#Top_level_Activity_toolbar_for_Write
>
> The mock-ups specifically keep the current Write functionality and tool
> groupings so it can be more easily compared with the current Write
> implementation.
>
> Regards,
> --Gary
>
>
>