From: AWaddington@acorn.co.uk (Andy Waddington)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn
Subject: Re: !impression - so how good is it?
Date: 14 Apr 92 22:47:33 GMT
Distribution: comp
Organization: Acorn Computers Ltd, Cambridge, England

charles@morgan.ucs.mun.ca (Charles Loader) writes:

>I have used troff, view, WordPerfect, Ami-Pro, !impression and a few others.
>For my purposes !impression seems as good as any and easier to use than most.
>
>There are some other things that seem to be missing (I do not use them but
>wonder how they should be done).
>
>Footnotes - how are they done. There seems to be no built in mechanism.
>

Good point - the things that seem to be missing from !Impression that I
would really find useful are

Dynamic numbering and insertion of footnotes (ie. you build a footnote and
attach it to some point in the text, where a superscript number gets
inserted (all the numbers get updated through the chapter when you add a
new footnote) and the footnote appears at the foot of the same page or, if
this is impossible, then at the foot of the facing page, or possibly split
across the foot of both pages (all calculated on the fly...))

Fuzzy window anchoring (I'm sure the DTP world has a proper term for this,
but I don't know it). Instead of embedding a frame into the text (which can
leave a gap if the window is taller than a line of text, but narrower than
the page (ie. almost always), or can force a page break when you don't
really want one) you attach the frame to a point in the text, so that the
package can decide where to put it so as to be as close to that point as
possible (ie. on the same or a facing page). You would have to specify a few
extra parameters to do with whether text flowed to the left or the right of
it etc.

Facilities to support foreign language text. ie. a spelling checker that
copes with top-bit-set accented characters and with changing the alphabet
from the Latin1 default, ability to replace wholly the existing dictionary,
a style to say that some text should be checked with a different dictionary
(for mixed-language documents), or never checked at all. Oh, and a means to
remove (or hide) words in the main dictionary, so 

Literature citations: Whenever you inserted one, the citation (Bloggs,
1933a) would appear in the text and the full citation would get built in a
separate chapter (like the index).

Rather more sophisticated index building facilities (ie. you attach an index
entry, which doesn't have to be a word or phrase appearing in the main text)
to a specific point in, or block of text, and the index entry will get built
with either a specific page number or a page range. You need facilities to
split the index hierarchically, maybe by attaching styles to index entries
to specify their indentation levels and type styles. You would also need to
attach index entries to the above mentioned floating figures, with a style
to put those particular page numbers in italics. Lets face it, documentation
is useless without a good index, and I can't think that more than 0.001% of
all the computer documentation I have ever seen has an adequate index. The
need for good indices applies equally to anything you write, so making them
easier to build make it more likely that you will do it.

For those with printers that work at more than one resolution (eg. CC's own
laser-direct with the 600 dpi upgrade), styles or something similar that
can be used to specify that individual pages be printed at higher resolution
(for figures) or this could be done as a style that says any page containing
an item in this style be printed at the hgiher resolution (needs to be able
to apply to graphics as well as text, so a style may not be the thing...).

Currently, various things crash when you change the printer resolution,
probably because this involves loading a different driver module... So you
can't easily change resolution for some pages by printing groups of pages
under 'manual' control. This gets really horrible for the various leaflet
formats...

Some of these things are obviously hideously difficult - but then so are
some of the things it already does - so how about it CC ? [Do they have an
Email address for fault reports/ change requests ?]

Andy.