[gnome-db] Re: GRAND MASTER PLAN

On Tue, Mar 09, 2004 at 09:23:54AM -0600, Linas Vepstas wrote:
> 
> Well, for Act 1, you're right, I don't.  But for Act II ... yes,
> literally.  Pushbuttons, you name it.
> 
> OK, now that you've got this mastered: let me pile on a few things.
> For act I scene II:
> 
> -- colors, font sizes.  At least for financial reports, negative
>    numbers are sometimes printed in red.  Of course, one won't know
>    if the number will be positive or negative until runtime, so the
>    color needs to be settable at runtime.
> 
>    (Yes, color alone is an accessibility issue; so other visual
>    indicators are used as well. (a simple minus sign is too small,
>    too easily confused for lint). Parens might be used, or
>    italics or bold might be selected.)
> 
> -- might be useful to allow the "hide this" for visual display 
>    as well. For example, the report designer created a document
>    with two blank fields,  and at runtime, we discover that one
>    of them will be blank forever.  So at run time, we hide it.
> 
>    (I've seen this done in form letters, where certain geographies
>    get an extra sentance or two in thier form letter which the
>    others do not.  Another example is a report for assets and
>    liabilities: if there are no liabilities, you hide the table
>    rather than showing a table with a zero in it. )
> 
>    (If you can hide, then this allows the programmer to implement 
>    a basic either/or: show/hide the liabilities table, and 
>    show/hide the sentance: "There are no liabilities.")
> 
> -- tables. Reports will usually have tables in them, and the number
>    of rows won't be known until runtime. (The columns are usually
>    static. Usually).
> 
>    Tables might be nested.  I don't know if abi supports that.

This starts to sound alot more like a spreadsheet than a document.
Gnumeric can already offer many of those capabilities now.

- It can contain widgets (although they need to do more)
- value formating is fairly strong (that engine will be in
  libgoffice)
- we support hiding cols/rows
- subtotals

We're missing hiding individual values, although that's fairly
trivial.  There is also no support for triple underlines.

Sounds like what you really need is a way to generate an abi
document that contains a spreadsheet and a way to print the result.