Programmatic access to author styles

[sijomon]

Hi,

I have a number of requirements that relate to highlighting in author mode. Some of these have been succesfully implemented using alternative CSS styles sheets, however I see no obvious way of using this mechanism to implement the remaining requirements. An example of such a requiremenst is: 'Citation elements that have been automatically marked-up must be colour coded to indicate the level of certainty of the automatic match'. A brief explanation, a user opens a document and highlights some text and invokes one of my custom Operations which surrounds the selected text with an XML element, the operation then searches through the remainder of the document and identifies other pieces of text as needing the same XML, in each case there is an associated certainty that the new text is a correct match. The user needs to be informed, using text highlighting colours, of the various levels of certainty for each of the automatic matches. We, as far as possible, must avoid neccesitating changes to the document schema.

Have you any recommendations or inform ation that may assist? The ideal solution would be the ability to interact directly with Oxygens styling engine to enable me to create and (re)assign vitual style rules to arbitary elements without modifying the actual CSS or document file themselves; I don't suppose this is possible is it?

Many thanks for any assistance,

Simon.

[sorin_ristache]

Hello,

We plan to enhance the Author API for allowing an Author extension to add highlights on text strings of the document. We will provide an AuthorUserHighlighter object that can be used in an Author extension and that can add highlights to the edited Author document, remove highlights and get a list of all current highlights. A custom highlight painter can be set for painting a highlight but a default painter that just underlines a text is also provided by the API. If you want to test an Author build that includes this new API please let us know and we will provide such a build for you.


Regards,
Sorin

[sijomon]

Thanks for the information, that is exactly the feature I'm after. Do you know which future release this will be included in, and what the approximate release date will be?

[sorin_ristache]

It will be included in the next version of Oxygen. We are finishing the implementation of this API. If you or other Author extension developers are interested in beta testing it just let us know.


Regards,
Sorin

[sijomon]

A beta version would be very useful, can you send a copy to my board email address, and any documentation that maybe ready as well please.

Many thnaks,

Simon.

[sorin_ristache]

I sent the details about the test build to your email address.


Regards,
Sorin

[sijomon]

Yes, I have got it and will be looking at it this week, many thanks. I can't guarantee how thorough a workout I will be able to give this feature as it is entirely possible we'll decide we have to go with 10.3 and can't wait for this feature to be releaseed, in which case I am likely to have to stop working with your beta release. If I do get get some feedback, I'll pass it on.