Re: [office] Visibility and protection of layers

[David Faure <faure@kde.org>]

On Monday 23 June 2003 16:28, Daniel Vogelheim wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> in a previous meeting we have agreed to add visibilty and protection to 
> drawing layers, as suggested by David. It was my action item to suggest 
> names which are compatible with the rest of the format. Here goes:
> 
> Text sections have similar properties.
> Protection:  <text:section text:protected="false" 
> text:protection-key="..."/>
> Visibilty:     <text:section text:display="true" text:condition="..." 
> text:is-hidden="..."/>
> 
> 1) text:protected marks a section as write-protected.
> 2) text:protection-key stores the hash of a password to disable protection
> 3) text:display determines between normal display ("true"), hidden 
> ("none") or hidden based on a condition ("condition").
> 4) text:condition contains the condition string (if hiding is based on a 
> condition)
Can this condition be something like "this is displayed on screen,
but not when printing"?
If not, this could be a useful addition, even for layers (apparently 
Adobe Illustrator has that, see below).

(Overall I'm still a bit confused by the condition stuff. Can users enter
conditions in kind of a scripting language? Is that language specified in 
the file format? I haven't seen it yet, but I might have missed it.
Hmm, anyway, even if it's possible to model "not when printing" as a
condition, this is far from as convenient as a GUI element to do that).

> So... I suggest we add draw:protected="true|false" and 
> draw:display="true|none" to the <draw:layer> element.

Looks very good.
The only addition we would suggest is maybe a "screenonly"
value for draw:display, for "helper" layers, which are only to be shown
on screen but not in print, like Adobe Illustrator offers.

The reason why this would be better than a separate attribute
(print = true/false), is that the combination "print=true + display=false"
can be very surprising to the user. With the solution of a "screenonly" value 
for draw:display, this can't happen.

Summary: I suggest we add draw:protected="true|false" and 
draw:display="true|screenonly|none" to the <draw:layer> element.

Thanks,
David.
-- 
David FAURE, faure@kde.org, sponsored by Trolltech to work on KDE,
Konqueror (http://www.konqueror.org), and KOffice (http://www.koffice.org).
Qtella users - stability patches at http://blackie.dk/~dfaure/qtella.html