Difference between revisions of "Notes2"

Revision as of 17:11, 28 April 2007

Introduction

Notes2 is a new project to improve the general notes functionality in the Writer module of OpenOffice. This has started as one accepted project in Google's Summer of Code 2007, but will be also worked on after the GSOC is over. The general idea is to improve

• visualisation of notes
  • show notes on right margin permantly with full text instead of tiny little yellow box
  • direct editing inside the note window including richtext formatting and spell checking

• usability of notes
  • direct/easier editing and deleting of notes
  • menu changes, details need to be discussed

• navigator related to notes
  • possibility to sort notes by author, date, position

Implementation

The implementation has to be able to handle at least the following items:

• scrollable

• able to handle richtext to include text with attributes

• different position, sizes and background colors

• able to be drawable inside the right margin

• spell checking

After discussion with several people, there seem to be two different possibilities:

Both implementation will use the EditEngine as well as an OverlayObject for a connection line from anchor point to the note itself

Usability

Several questions related to the appearance and usability have to be decided:

• main color of notes
  • Suggestion: natural color of physical postit notes)

• when to show vertical scrollbars if all notes need it due to a full page: if we show them,it could be confusing to the user and could look alien, if we don't, user might not be aware of the full length and miss text

• what about meta information such as date and author: should this be shown permantly inside the note, in the tooltip or only inside the navigator

• different colors or intensity when editing a certain note

• appearance of connection line from anchor point to note
  • could be a dotted line turning into a full line while editing or always a full line

QA entries related to notes in writer

Work will address issues 1981, 6193, 9776, 12846, 16251, 23465, 38819, 45788, 48150, 58867 and 62625.

Further Thoughts

There are several items which are nice to have, but will eventually not make it into the first release:

• different colored boxes for different authors
• attaching comments not only to a text position, but also a selection of text. As the ODF format for notes does not allow this currently, there are two possibilities:
  • use ODF metadata, if version 1.2 is approved
  • in collaboration with other ODF implementations, change the format of notes inside the ODF format

Screenshots of other notes implementations

note in right margin, yellow postit color

TextMaker 2006

note in right margin with extending of white paper background, red color

MS Word 2003

note in right margin with extending of white paper background, red color

Apple Pages