Old Virtual Pen Project History

Continuing cleanup in VP.FrontEnd.Logic.Selector, VP.FrontEnd.GUI.SamplePalette, etc.
Redrawing of the samples by the sample palette is now also done in the main RefreshContents method, which provides a much smoother display.
The displayed sample matches the selected object(s). If several different objects are selected, then the default polyline sample is used. Perhaps we should have a special shape, different from the default polyline sample ?
Improved thin line selection : the visual feed-back has now a minimal width, which makes it visible whatever scale the document is displayed in.

Debugging : fixed an assertion failure in the grip management, caused by a bug in DocObj::MultiPtCreator.
Working on the attribute palette.
Afternoon off duty.

Fixed following small problems :
- Do not display first grip while creating a figure such as a polygonal line.
- Moved sub-tools creation into the MainToolBase class (this is no longer the responsibility of the SamplePalette, which allows for a much simpler update and expansion of the tools).
- Added customised attribute edition (e.g. hiding of the unused surface attribute for a segment).
Debugging.
Started redesign of the attribute palette.

Rewritten the string width calculation, using a simpler method than the previous rendering to a monochrome 1-pixel high bitmap.
Finishing the implementation of the help area label class, which needed the ability to display rich text. Currently, there is a very simple parser in the VP.Forms.ThemeHelper class, which recognizes the <b> and </b> tags.

Improving creation : primary and secondary grips are only detected if the Shift key is held down; automatic validation grips (open/close) are detected if Shift is not held down.
Worked on the help area in the main tool palette. Daniel won't like it, but I do :-)

Trouble with my disk mirroring setup. I spent almost all day trying to get it work again properly...

Implemented grip management during object creation : this allows the user to move grips in a figure while the figure is being created. This works also with the undo/redo features, but needed a few fixes to the object creation code (grips were not numbered properly and information was not always stored in the proper fields).
Experimented with keyboard event handling and pre-processing (which will be needed to trap the Alt key and inhibit the automatic repetition events sent by Windows for Shift, Ctrl and Alt keys).

The bug hit on 03 July was in fact the combination of several problems, which had to be addressed separately :
- Moving in the command list did not properly hand the FORK markers.
- Redoing a list of commands which included a FORK marker skipped the element immediately after the FORK.
- Undoing and redoing interfered with the temporary point creation; now, after every undo and redo event, the object creator (ObjectCreation.cs) queries the core to know if/what object is being edited.
- The grips added during creation by the VP::DocObj::GraphicCreator were not all removed.
Downloaded OpenOffice sources. I think there might be interesting code in the MySpell tools... Also explored the ispell solution.
I finally got access to Microsoft Typography Group's Open Type Layout Services Library (OTLS), which might help me in the OpenType information extraction, when implementing text into VP.

Working on creation feed-back : show the grips of the objects being created. While working on this feature, I hit a bug with undo/redo commands while creating a figure.
Afternoon: no work...

Candidate highlighting of objects with transparent surfaces also highlighted the surface, which was not a good idea when painting wires with the polyline. Fixing this required quite a bit of work in the a.selgrips management class (more specifically, it has to analyse the a.alpha attribute found in the a.surface moderator, but without doing any painting).
Broadcast a VP::CoreEvent::Doc_UndoRedoPending event before any undo/redo operation (without any delaying), so that the anyone who tweaked the document may restore it to a safe state (see below).
Fixed a few problems with the temporary line which is following the cursor (especially with respect to undo/redo and tool switching).
Surface testing also tests the outline of the figure, so that figures with a large outline get detected in an intuitive way.
Fixed two bugs related with the loading of a document with mismatched plug-ins :
- The missing type definitions (UCID to type mapping) were not added properly in the document, and the wrong index was used to declare the new type definition objects.
- The document views were not reinitialised, which caused trouble since the associated document view definition object could be located elsewhere in the newly loaded document. A full delete and reconstruction of all VP::DocView instances is needed when the Reset event is generated internally.

Compiled paintlib under Visual Studio .NET (this might become a component of VP in the near future).
Fixed graphic glitches related to the asynchronicity of the BelowCursorFinder class (this took me about 6 hours, until late in the night to get it right).

After getting feed-back from Daniel about the version I sent him on last Friday, there were a lot of small things to fix in the user interface behaviour. I almost fixed everything (there are still 5 open problems).
When creating a polyline, display the last segment from the current end point to the cursor position, even when the user does not press and drag : this gives a better visual feed-back of what is happening.
Transparent surfaces don't automatically get detected. The user has to press CTRL in order to activate transparent surface detection.
When switching tools, the object creation is validated.