A new idea for WYSIWYG rich text editors

"Klaus Linke" wrote:
Though it may be a bit dangerous to "misuse" track changes for making
annotations.
I routinely "accept all changes" when I get documents from others, because
many people forget to do that.
This would turn the "comments" into regular text.

Well, I'm not all that sophisticated a user, and neither are my students, so
none of us had ever heard of Accepting Track Changes, so it was okay. But I
found that Track Changes mode encouraged me to *rewrite* a student's paper,
and decided I prefer using Comments, and highlighting to flag typos. Very
hard to underline a phrase and note "unclear" using Track Changes.

However, since Track Changes already exists, I wonder how hard would it be
to create a Pen Mode that is essentially Track Changes with the ability to
Accept them disabled? But that sure seems like an unnecessary bell and
whistle. I should think a note in the covering email would prevent the
Accept All problem.

Dayo




"Dayo Mitchell" wrote:
I could see "Pen Mode" being useful, but I think we kinda already have
it--if you turn on Track Changes and type in the text, all annotations
will
show up in a different format. There's no reason the person being
reviewed
can't just read that and skip the Accept/Reject changes part. I've
commented papers that way before, and students were fine with it.

But maybe I'm missing something? I'm coming late to this discussion.

DM

"Booted Cat" wrote:

Hi,

"Klaus Linke" wrote in message
...
Hi Yao,

If you insert an annotation (= comments) anywhere, Word will
automatically
apply the "Comment Text" style.

So it already works as you propose?


Word's Insert|Annotation command inserts annotations on the right side
of the original document, so it isn't very intuitive. And it isn't a
formatting tool. And to insert an annotation you have to choose the
menu or do some shortcut, not very convenient for frequent annotation
insertions.

If you don't want to use Word's annotation mechanism, you can use your
own
character or paragraph style for annotations, and assign a keyboard
shortcut for it.

Even one extra keystroke seems wasteful before inputting each new
annotation.


Not that I don't understand your "pen mode" concept, but I think it
would
be confusing.
If I put the cursor somewhere in some text, I expect that what I type
will
appear in the style that's applied to that text.

Pen Mode is mainly intended for annotating on someone else's work, so
it's not very likely that modifying existing text is needed.


Regards,
Klaus



Anyway, I've submitted it as a new feature to OpenOffice's bug report
system...




"Booted Cat" wrote:
Hello All,

When I loaded a document to OpenOffice Writer and wanted to add
annotation text immediately after some words, I found it difficult to
easily insert annotation text with another formatting to multiple
positions of the original text.

Suppose the original text is formatted with Times New Roman, Unbold:

aaa bbb ccc ddd eee fff ggg hhh iii jjj kkk.

And I want to append annotations "123", "456", "789" formatted with
Arial Bold to the words "bbb", "ddd", "fff" in the original text, to
make it like this:

aaa bbb [123] ccc ddd [456] eee fff [789] ggg hhh iii jjj kkk.

Here [ ] means the enclosed text is formatted with Arial Bold, a
different formatting from that of the original text.

In practice I want to annotate for much more words than the above
simplified example. What makes my task difficult is that all WYSIWYG
(What You See Is What You Get) rich text editors (Microsoft Word,
OpenOffice Writer, Wordpad, etc.) apply the formatting of the current
selection point as you type. To change the formatting of the current
selection point, you have to do extra clicks or keyboard shortcuts.
And when you move the selection point to another position, the
current
formatting automatically changes according to the new position. This
behavior may be useful in general, but I suggest rich text editors to
allow a new formatting mode - that is to say, once you choose a
formatting, all subsequent inputs will use this formatting,
regardless
where you input. I call this new mode "Pen Mode", because it is like
choosing a new pen of another color/size and writing anywhere in the
document without having to reset to this formatting again and again.

Best Regards,
Yao Ziyuan
http://babelcode.crazylife.org

Dayo Mitchell wrote:
Comments, but not inline: What about (mis-)using footnotes ...?
[..]
Because every doc I edit has footnotes already!

Touché!

..bob
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