Comment out text

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juca

Hi,

I would suggest the following feature: commenting out text. It is very similar to the programming languages comment style where you can do something like this:

This is my well written paragraph, and I think is cool.

/*
This is my messy paragraph that has some cool ideas but is not yet ready. So I can just write and don't care if I mess up the document.
*/

Here is more text that ready for publishing. Great text.

When I publish this, the "comments" will be just ignored. I used this in latex and it was very useful.

johanneswilm

Interesting. How could this be done in a way that is intuitive for WYSIWYG-oriented users? Any suggestions? Part of the idea with FW is to make less technical users be able to use the tool intuitively.

When I wrote my anthro thesis in LaTEX, part of the problem was that those who were supposed to read the "source code" of the thesis (people helping me with languages fixes, professors, etc.) weren't able to read the text once there were commandos in there (like \cite{...}), even if those commands were quite simple to me as a tech-person. So that's something to avoid.

juca

Well, I would send to the surpervisors the "finished" version of the text.

OR to make it friendly to new users it can be a special button that would grey out the text. And it can be called something like ideas, thoughts, drafts, text snippets.
Maybe another button can hide / show all the drafts that are in the text so that you can see the final version and the drafting version.
It can be some kind of advanced function that could be part of an advanced features collection.

johanneswilm

Would it be an option to do this as part of tracked changes? Maybe call it "proposed changes" and for the output filters allow to select whether the proposed changes are all accepted or all rejected? Maybe not quite the same, but it seems this should be integrateable with the idea of more metadata for tracked changes.

johanneswilm

Actually, my idea makes no sense because the UI would have to be different. One should be able to select some text and tag it as having "draft status". Hmmm...

juca

Yes, integrating it into change tracking would be also an option.

xdej

What about a simple command to delete the selected text portion, and to paste it automatically in a comment, in the format of the .fidus file (is it json?) ? And another button in the comment form that delete the comment and paste its text in the text if the json parses well enough ?

juca

I still insist in the "draft text" idea.
It gives me a lot of freedom to write.
It makes a big difference if I can just start writing in a document and develop my ideas on the way. If for any reason the paragraph is not finished or not good enough, then I can just mark it as "draft text". It will not be printed or exported, but will remain there for further editing. Or it will be simply deleted after a while.