Hyperion Entertainment Message Boards

I started here (my last msg)
http://www.amigans.net/modules/xforum/v ... 55&forum=3
describing what imho would enhance the usability of the amigaguide.format.

- A new type of link the "Insert Link" or ILINK that inserts the node at the ILINK position
- automatic generation of tables of content
- autiomatic generation of the index.

I did write a sort of "test of concept" viewer in Gui4Cli and it does the above easily.
For treelike structures (defined by a set of TOC ) which is the most used form of a manual this would speedup writing quite a deal.

In the test of concept viewer i added 2 browsing buttons <before>< <after> (under the existing <previous><next > buttons
that should follow the "physical" sequence of nodes 'as they follow in the document'

The first subnode for a TOC should have no explicit "previous" and the last no explicit "next", alowing easy swapping of chapters or sections
The viewer should take care of the normal reading sequence: defined by the the 'TOC's next and previous nodes at all levels.

@JosDuchIt

The viewer is IMHO a secondary problem here. Solution should be taken on the datatypes level, i.e. by creating an ebook-type datatype masterclass for structured formats like AmigaGuide, DocBook or ePUB. The document control functionality including a hierarchical TOC would then be provided by the masterclass and shown in MultiView.

@trixie;

i do agree of course, just wanted to clarify my ideas about what is lacking in the almigaguide datatype

It's simply old and badly written, just like AmigaGuide Library. These things date back to the times when Commodore apparently hired local village idiots to to the job.

trixie wrote:It's simply old and badly written, just like AmigaGuide Library.

amigaguide.library barely does anything since 3.0 - it's all implemented in amigaguide.datatype (amigaguide.library is just a Multiview-style wrapper).
I suspect all the code from the v34 amigaguide.library was largely copied'n'pasted into amigaguide.datatype. The "document" superclass is a bit of an oddity, it needs classing properly similar to the hypertext superclasses and their subclasses on Aminet.