gmane.editors.serna.user

[Serna] Normal scrolling view for writing


  I cannot understand why the editing pane for DITA topics in Serna 
divides content into pages.  The page breaks will almost certainly be 
elsewhere when the various outputs are generated and scrolling 
through the page breaks is a pane (as a longtime FrameMaker user, I 
speak from great experience).  Why not have a Normal view as in Word, 
a bit like a browser, that has no page breaks and reflows when you 
resize the editing pane?

Regards,
Hedley

--
Hedley Stewart Finger
28 Regent Street   Camberwell VIC 3124   Australia
Tel. +61 3 9809 1229   Mobile +61 412 461 558,
E-mail <mailto:hfinger@...>

headers

Don Day | 8 Jan 15:11

Re: [Serna] Normal scrolling view for writing

In other editors, this view is sometimes called a Galley view. The XSL
Formatting Objects model upon which Serna's rendering is based is
inherently page-oriented, so the page breaks you see are more or less an
artifact of using an output-oriented stylesheet as the editor's rendering
model. There is nothing wrong with that--in simple cases, the stylesheet
used for output might actually be perfectly usable in Serna as the editing
model, reducing maintenance on stylesheets overall. As you point out,
DITA's multiple forms of output sort of make the page model meaningless, at
least in a philosophical sense. But many authors who are used to word
processor behaviors do find that the XSL FO page model is still more
natural for them.

The galley mode can be faked in any page-oriented styling system by
defining a page size that is so long that any reasonable document will
still compose within the same first page.  I haven't tried this with
Serna's DITA stylesheets, but I suppose you could give it a try and see
what happens. Like the base font size suggestion I had, this also could be
overridden in the SDT file as a master setting that you could switch from
the user preferences dialog. What do the Serna developers think about that
idea? There are times that I would support that type of view for certain
authors (particularly those who are working on help content, that is rarely
composed with page-based output in mind).

Regards,
--
Don Day
Chair, OASIS DITA Technical Committee
Chair, IBM DITA Architects Board
Email: dond@...
11501 Burnet Rd. MS9033E015, Austin TX 78758

(Continue reading)

headers

Paul Antonov | 8 Jan 21:40

Re: [Serna] Normal scrolling view for writing

Hedley,

the pageless view feature is planned for the next Serna release. It will 
be possible to switch between paged and page-less view without re-opening 
the document.

Regards,

-- Paul

On Tue, 8 Jan 2008, Hedley Finger wrote:

>
> I cannot understand why the editing pane for DITA topics in Serna divides 
> content into pages.  The page breaks will almost certainly be elsewhere when 
> the various outputs are generated and scrolling through the page breaks is a 
> pane (as a longtime FrameMaker user, I speak from great experience).  Why not 
> have a Normal view as in Word, a bit like a browser, that has no page breaks 
> and reflows when you resize the editing pane?
>
> Regards,
> Hedley
>
>
> --
> Hedley Stewart Finger
> 28 Regent Street   Camberwell VIC 3124   Australia
> Tel. +61 3 9809 1229   Mobile +61 412 461 558,
> E-mail <mailto:hfinger@...>
>

(Continue reading)