Re: RTF in the canvas?

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Vlad Harchev <hvv hippo ru> writes: 
>  If all complex features like tables and probably nested lists and even pics
> are needed, I would suggest to use html as layout description language - it's
> almost as rich as RTF, but humanly readable and may be already
> partially supported by existing components like gtkhtml or gecko.
> 

This markup language was designed for GtkLabel - we are not making
GtkLabel an HTML widget. ;-)

The motivation is given very simply in the markup docs, which is that
you have to change the position and possibly nature of the text
attributes when you translate a string; so it has to be encoded in the
string to translate. That is, saying:
   set_bold (string, start_index, end_index)
would hardcode facts about the English string. So the only good way we
could think of to support text attributes on substrings is to use a
markup language, so the attributes get translated with the string.

It's obviously possible to support a more elaborate markup with tables
and so on as well, but that should probably be a separate feature.
Whether to use HTML depends on what it's used for.

Havoc