Help editor coming along...

Discussion in 'Negative Energy Plane' started by Kentamanos, Sep 26, 2003.

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  1. Kentamanos

    Kentamanos Member

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    I didn't want to litter any of the other threads with this, but I thought some people might be curious...

    I made some good progress on the help editor last night. Currently it can load the file, create a tree of "tags" (plan on the nodes having children later, so it's a tree for now), edit the content of the tags, drag a tag from the document tree to the content and create a link automatically using the tag's tite as the text, and save/save As.

    There are some somewhat challenging design issues for the interface of this editor (unless of course I made it a simple grid control, but I'm sure the direction I'm going is easier to use than that). If you have some suggestions, feel free to chime in.

    I'm not sure how easy to use I can make some concepts in the help file. Column 3 (especially) and Column 4 are kind of hard to represent in a UI. I'm sure the first pass will be pretty much just a "edit the property" type thing. Column 3 is a single tag, so I'll make it a textbox that accepts drag and drop from the tag tree. Column 4 is a list of parents, so it will be a drag and drop listbox type thing. Only one of these columns ever seem to be used on a given tag, and I'll probably have the program enforce that rule.

    I'm having a hard time designing the actual content editor. For now, it's a RichTextBox (only for color highlighting). I've removed the 0x0B character requirement for a newline and just have it using standard \n. At this time, links will use the ~Text~[TAG] format just like the file. I'd like to use something else there, but I don't want to confuse people too much. I would personally lean towards some sort of XML text, but I'm not sure how much people would want that.

    I'll most likely use color highlighting to highlight special syntax. I'll probably also use this to highlight errors (tags without closes, links to tags that don't exist, etc.). In addition to highlighting the error on the individual tag's content panel, I'll probably highlight it in the tree as well somehow (red X beside it in the tree or something...).

    The next big thing will be a preview. I'm thinking I might host an IE control and intercept all navigation commands by hand, having it move to the new page appropriately. As far as previewing the file in the editor, I think I'll make that a popup window (so that you can move off the current node to test out other links without changing which node you're currently editing). Eventually I might go all out and create a custom control for this preview (using the bitmap fonts in the game, etc.).

    Hopefully I'll have a "usable" version later tonight.
     
  2. EvilMulder

    EvilMulder Member

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    That sounds great, can't wait to get my hands on it! :beer:
     
  3. Kentamanos

    Kentamanos Member

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    I should have something this weekend

    :beta:

    *looks around for a smiley holding a sign that says v 0.000001*
     
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