note editor

[marcelloh]

You can enter a note in the properties of an object, but sometimes you want the note to have more functionalities like:

• Nested numbers
• a Table
• Horizontal rule
• Indenting
• Spellchecking

Even this forum editor has more functionalities  ;)

Would this be possible in the near future?
(Or perhaps an integration with an external editor)

[«Midnight»]

There is limited support for spell checking; check the EA help file.

As to the rest, definitely good ideas.

What we - the collective user community - need to do is get together and provide Sparx with a clear, concise, set of editing enhancements, versus a bunch of wish lists. Such an enhancement set could form the basis for an excellent feature request. Of course, Sparx might choose to add an overlapping set of features. Still, Sparx cannot easily satisfy our requirements if we don't make them clear.

[marcelloh]

I would say that a call to and external editor is the best option.
Most of them support a lot of wish-list options, so with this single solution, many wishes are fullfilled.

Since other people use the documentation made by EA, the docs must be of a certain proffesional quality.
(Take for instance some simple wish as a decent spell-checker or grammar/style checking: Hard to program, but perhaps easy to borrow)

Another big advantage is that can work in your native language, and for instance: since mine is Dutch, starting a spell check from within EA is a disaster, since none of the words are recognized. And how about the sharing of the user dictionary? In an external editor, the spell check is often native language oriented and full with words to start with.

[«Midnight»]

IMHO Please keep this in mind; my opinion only, for what it's worth. (Hopefully > 0.00 CAD)

But having used your external editor, you still have the issue of rendering. After all, you won't be able to interact with your model - at the human level that is - without rendering. At the automation level you take responsibility for rendering, so the EA editor - or any other solution that just let's you shovel content into the notes - is sufficient.

So the bottom line is that Sparx would have to develop a rendering engine to handle whatever the external editor provided. There is a major external dependency there, since it would be impossible to 'contain' the feature list and handling of the external product (at least as long as it remained external). If EA were to support multiple external editors or protocols the complexity would explode.

The current approach, while in no way complete, is a good first step. The tags are familiar, being loosely based on a familiar public-domain paradigm (HTML). The editor remains internal, avoiding the issue of synchronization and containing the size of the initial foray. The rendering engine is being improved.

Of the various components the rendering engine is the one that determines the long-term utility of formatted notes (regardless of the approach taken). It is also the one with the most front-end development and maintenance overhead.

All things considered I'll take the incremental approach over waiting for a full rendering engine implementation. This way I (we) can even submit interim suggestions for tweaks that might be impossible to implement if the entire engine were developed in one go-around.

David

[marcelloh]

I don't know what you mean with "the issue of rendering"?

I read about MsWord-automation, and it is possible to do some copy&paste stuff automatically, so back and forth from EA to MsWord.

Another 'funny' thing is, that with a linked document, you can handle more special things. Just by writing it in a decent texteditor and copy&paste it into this linked document editor.

Perhaps, a special button somewhere near a note editor, would open the big editor.

Let's say EA could handle html some more. That it would be simple to include a browser with an editor like 'tinymce' and voila.


BTW: This is just about sharing opinions and stuff
And hopefully give the people from Sparks enough ideas, so that they are not unemployed next month 

[«Midnight»]

Take a look at the Tools menu - and the documentation of External Tools (also called Custom Tools, but not indexed as such). You can set up your favorite editor there. I think Notepad is set up as the default - since it is present on all versions of Windows that EA has run on.

As I said, you can assign another editor, whether in place of or as well as the EA default. You can also set up arguments that can be passed at the time you open the tool - it is possible to set up the same tool several times, each with different arguments, or none. These arguments can be translated by EA to insert run-time values. Once again, see the EA documentation.

You don't seem to be able to set up a keyboard shortcut, at least not a 'hot key' combination. You can set up keys for quick menu navigation though.

For example, I set Notepad++ to be my default external editor. Once I do this I can quickly open the application. Note that I also use the same tool for viewing some code files (such as XML and DDL) but specifically excluding others (such as Visual Studio languages, which I want VS to handle). These additional 'tool' settings are done elsewhere in EA.

Once you've done this - it takes much less time than reading my post - you can quickly open an editor. The cut and paste still remains for you, but at least you are part way to what you need.

David

[bwl21]

to be honest, I even treat richt text notes as a problem for post processing. To much infromation goes into the formatting instead of the words.

[skiwi]

• Nested numbers
• a Table
• Horizontal rule
• Indenting

not in EA 11

[juliek01]

This new feature would be great...even just allowing nested numbering would be a great place to start!

[qwerty]

You have noticed that this thread originates from 6 years ago, haven't you?

q.