Annotations and text-wrap

Hello there,
	I have a question about the implementation of the SVG engine, which may or
may not already have been asked, but which, at the company I work for, lies
at the ehart of our problems in using XML graphics rendering.
	Essentially, we're looking at a reliable way of using XML to store and then
render annotations to text documents. At the momet we can annotate images,
simply by using a scalable coordinate system, but when it comes to text we
hit upon a bit of a snag: Let's say Person A receives an email on a
Palmtop/embedded device, and replies by making simple annotations to the
text - an underline here, a circle there. This is then sent back to Person
B, who looks at it on a desktop computer. The text wrapping is now
different, but this doesn't *really* present a problem - if a circle is
associated with a word, it will still get drawn around a word, no worries.
What about is a circle or underline is drawn around *two* words, maybe more?
Again, fine - so long as the words are all on a single line, that is. What
would happen if the words were wrapped onto two lines. The line is still
associated with all three, but would the coordinates of the line itself,
when it's being rendered, also be wrapped? What would happen to a circle or
ellipse associated with two words? The renderer would have to, for example,
re-create the circle, scaled/mapped to each word, twice, once for the word
at the end of a line, once again for the word at the beginning of a line.
	At the moment we are still looking at our own binary format, tailored
slightly to map onto a seperate plain-text document, but if this sort of
thing could be done reliably with an XML application then we could really be
on good ground...

I hope that this information could be of some use, and that someone there
would think this a reasonable area to aim for. I'm about to try to sign onto
this list properly, so I should be able to receive any replies through
there, but I'd appreciate it if anyone replying could cc my direct email
address also.

Cheers,
-Jim

---
Jim Dovey, Webmaster, Software Engineer
Informal Software, 2060 Walsh Ave., Suite 192, Santa Clara CA 95050
email: webmaster@informalsoftware.com
URL: http://www.informalsoftware.com

Received on Tuesday, 21 September 1999 04:54:52 UTC