Notes (and other text) fields to support RTF

[Dave_Bullet]

I want to minimise the post editing on RTF documents produced from EA.  I often have to add for example bullet points.

It would be nice if the "Notes" fields (and any other text type field) could support rich text.  This means I could put bullet points, tables etc.. into the notes to minimise the edits on produced RTFs.

Thanks,
David.

[«Midnight»]

This is one of the most asked-for features I'm afraid. No definitive response from Sparx as yet.

Life continues...

[Paolo F Cantoni]

It would be nice if the "Notes" fields (and any other text type field) could support rich text.  This means I could put bullet points, tables etc.. into the notes to minimise the edits on produced RTFs.

David,
There are strong rumours formatted text in Notes is coming...

However, I haven't been privy to any details.

Our view is that if you are going to go to that amount of effort, you should really include the ability to:

• specify some forms of formatting styles (both paragraph and character - ala MS Word).
  
• search and replace including style information (that is, only replace if the source or target have the specified formatting - again, ala MS Word)
  
• automatically provide an unformatted version of the text for other uses (perhaps via a derived property Notes.Unformatted)
  
• display/not display formatted text on the diagram (such as in Feature-linked-Notes or the new, coming, Notes compartments.
  

Now would would appear the time to discuss this.  Better late than never...

Paolo

[size=0]©2006 Paolo Cantoni, -Semantica-[/size]

[«Midnight»]

Paolo

Yes
Yes
Yes, through the API and the clipboard (both choices in the latter case)
Yes

That should fit well with your drive towards consistency. While RTF can do the formatting things for us, we're likely coming to the end of the (active) lifetime for the format, with Office 2007. Still, it'll doubtless be around for a while in the present form.

In the long run I'd love to see one or both of the new XML formats (MS or Oasis - both are good), but I'm certainly willing to wait.

This is one area where I often think we'll need to wait until the next breaking change to the EA schema. It is getting long in the tooth, so perhaps we'll see something for version 7.0. Some time ago I think Sparx hinted that might not be too far away.

David