Anybody working on text column separators?

[C. Boemann]

On Thursday 19 July 2012 17:50:12 Friedrich W. H. Kossebau wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I came across the issue that columns in texts are not yet completely
> supported. Is anyone working on that?
> 
> For a start I did a patch (attached) which makes at least the column
> separator data survive a roundtrip through Words. Might be worth to add as
> bugfix to 2.5. What do you think?
> 
> For master I would like to also add actually rendering the column separator
> as well as adding a control to the page style dialog to configure it. But
> I have no idea yet how I best implement the rendering. I looked e.g. at
> KWFrameLayout but saw no solution waiting between the code lines.
> 
> Any proposals from Words insiders how to approach this?
> 
> Support for different column widths are a separate issue and have no need
> for me ATM :)
> 
> Cheers
> Friedrich
Hi

Please move the parsing methods to lib odf too, we will need them elsewhere as 
I'll explain below.

and yes we eventually need to backport it too, before the release. It's data 
loss.

As far as rendering is concerned we are in trouble. The kind of columns words 
supports currently (pagestyle defined columns) are implemented with separate 
textshapes for each column.

This means there is no shape where we want to draw the separator. I actually 
don't have a solution right now. Maybe adding extra none-editable pathshapes 
in words/part/frames/KWFrameLayout.cpp.

The other type of columns that we don't render at all (section columns) also 
needs to load and save separator info, so maybe look into that before 
committing (only if you can make it before 2.5 is released).

For section columns look at style:section-properties which loads style:columns 
which loads section:column-sep. The section-properties are currently 
implemented in kotext/KoSectionStyle.cpp which really should use KoColumns 
and your new stuff somehow to handle column-sep

We can't draw section columns at all yet (but at least I have a plan for that) 
so we can't draw the separators here either.

/Boemann