DCF file question

[ptc-953926]

Adepters:

Our authoring doctypes have always included these entries in the .dcf file to replace our <para> begin and end tags with symbols:

<elementdisplay element="para" fulltagmodeicon="para" pair="start"/">
<elementdisplay element="para" fulltagmodeicon="endpara" pair="end"/">

Now, about half of our users would rather see the tags displayed, primarily so that the <para> attributes are easy to see (with symbols, you only see that the symbol is filled in, indicating that there are attributes set). Does anyone know of an easy way to make these DCF settings optional or user-selectable? The best solution I can think of would involve two .dcf files and the user would (through our update process) get one or the other depending on some variable setting. But, I'm looking for something more elegant.

Thanks,
Dave
Siemens

[PaulGrosso]

Note that there are three tag modes: full, partial, and none.

I have always thought that full should be full--all tags are
shown in full; none should be none--no tags; and partial should
be set up to show your preferred view for each tag, and partial
should be made the default view. You can set things up this
way yourself via the dcf file.

So you could set up your dcf file so that para show as icons
in partial mode only, and set up other tag preferences for
partial mode, and set full mode to show everything. With
partial set to be the initial view, the users will get the
same view by default as before, but they can easily toggle
to full (or none) tag view to see things like attributes.

(It is also the case that one should be able to see a tag's
attributes as a tool tip if you hover over the start tag
with the mouse long enough.)

paul

[ptc-953926]

Paul,

Thanks for the information. I wasn't aware of the tool tip when hovering over a para symbol.

As for full, partial, and none for tag settings, our experience (with some 125 authors) is that most of them only use full mode. And of those, over half prefer seeing para symbols (less screen clutter). I've never seen anyone have tag mode set to "none" and "partial" is the minority.

Dave

[naglists]

Another wrinkle to fold into this conversation: It is possible to write one
or more ACL functions that will set one, several, or ALL tags to a custom
set of displays and hang this/these functions off of the View menu. One
function could be executed on load satisfying "most" of your authors.
Probably not sustainable but you could also add authors' IDs to one or more
lists that get one set of display settings or another.

We have code that does something like this for Index markup. Normally
<indexterm> is shown -icon and all children are -none. show_tag() flips
these all to full. suppress_tag() reverts to the default -icon/-none. These
options are added to the Tools menu as Show Tag Markup and Suppress Tag
Markup.