Just a quick update on my progress in the Summer of Code.  One general observation: the piecetable is a highly-engineered, fairly complex chunk of code!  I need a bit more “mentoring” than I anticipated when working with the piecetable, so I’ve decided to work on a few fronts: when I get stuck on one, I switch to another until someone shows up in IRC and can help (or, alternatively, until time helps me figure it out on my own).

First of all, I have the Stylist enhancements.  I’ve added the “Add” button, which is succeeding in adding a hard-coded style.  Right now, I’m working to make it add from the current selection.  It looks like right now we can’t “rename” a style, which means I either prompt the user for a name (not what I’d prefer), generate a useful one automatically (possibly tough and/or insufficient) or implement some sort of rename, possibly just with the style label.  (See next )  I will also revamp the display here, borrowing liberally from the GTK toolbar style list which shows only a nice subset of styles.

The addition of Labels to styles (splitting internal identifier from user-visible identifier) was the first task I tackled, and in retrospect, possibly a bad idea since it required direct PT work.  I have all built-in styles adding a label by default, and I’ve gotten it to save.  I still have to add some helper functions to pd_Style to handle labels, localize them, etc, as well as figure out how to change the UI’s.  (It looks like I’ll probably need to have a map of Labels to Names added to some document-wide structure, presumably right next to the map of Names to pd_Style objects.)

Finally, we have the handling of the manual style editing system.  I’ve started work on this by implementing “simplifyProperties,” which removes properties from a style if they are identical in the based-on style (that is, if they can be inherited).  This will allow my edit dialog to show a useful list of applied properties, rather than a CSS-like string of every possible property.  This is what I’m working on at this precise moment - trying to figure out how I somehow end up with “this” being 0×0 when I have a function member call another function member.

Till next time, keep on marching, ants!