Re: [Denemo-devel] Custom menus

[Jean-René Reinhard]

On Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 09:24:31AM +0100, Richard Shann wrote:
> 
> Mulling this over, an improvement to the interface to custom menus would
> be this.
> Instead of a Favorites menu, adding a new menu item can be something you
> can access when you right click on a menu item. So, you have found the
> place where you would like to see Multi-Measure rests (perhaps you are
> looking under Measure, or Rest ...) and you right-click for help and you
> can set a shortcut, read the tooltip, etc as usual, but also, add in a
> new menu item there, to do the thing you wanted.

I don't think that allowing the user to setup the menu as he wants is good from
an UI point of view. He may end up not knowing where he put everything. Having a
sensible layout defined by the developpers seems more desirable to me.

> As I think it makes sense to send the right-click on the menu item to
> the manage-shortcuts dialog Jean-Rene` has written, this would mean
> expanding it to show the action path of the currently selected action
> (well, I suppose you don't have to show it, its a bit technical, but the
> dialog needs to know it, as the insertion point for a new menu item).
> and adding a New button, for adding new menu items, and a delete for
> deleting (/hiding) ones you don't want cluttering up your menus.
> 
> I've started thinking about how you would store your extra menu items.
> An xml file with entries like (remotely) this would do:
> 
> <menuitem name="GuitarFingering">
>       <location text="/ObjectMenu/Expressions">
>       <label text="Guitar Fingering">
>       <tooltip text="Add a guitar fingering to the note at the cursor">
>       <lilypond text="-%d">
>       <parameter type="int" low="1" high="5" prompt="Finger: ">
> <\menuitem>
>       
> This file would be written whenever the keymaprc was written, so the two
> would always be in step.

This is not necessary, since this file should not contain any information
relative to the keybinding.

> I don't know whether the syntax would be in the
> style above or
>               <location>"/ObjectMenu/Expressions"<\location>
> or something else.
> Perhaps someone who has read up on xml could comment.
> 
> Eventually we could have elements like
> <display type="icon" image="myImage.png" x="+20" y="-10">
> to indicate to the draw routine what and where to display (in the Denemo
> score area that is) at this point in the music. This display control is
> not intended to try and guess how LilyPond may lay out the music, just
> tell you at a glance what you have told LilyPond to do, without having
> to read the LilyPond text at that point in the music.
> 
> Richard
> 
> 
> 
> On Thu, 2008-06-12 at 20:41 +0100, Richard Shann wrote:
> > 
> > (This email was blocked when it had an attachment, here it is without)
> > 
> > At http://www.rshann.plus.com/customizedMenu.png  is a screenshot of
> > Denemo. Two of the menus are pinned-up, and
> > you can see on them two items which do not exist in the source. One is
> > Guitar Fingerings and the other Multi Measure Rests.
> > How did they get there? Well, you can see there is also a new menu
> > Favorites, which is in the source, which has an add favorite menuitem.
> > With this you can add a menuitem anywhere in the system, giving it a
> > name, tooltip and LilyPond text of your choice. (You can also add a
> > shortcut). 
> > When you click on the new item, you are offered the LilyPond text to
> > edit (e.g. MultiMeasure rests require a time signature and number of
> > measures) and
> > the action then inserts that LilyPond.
> > What's the point? Well, if you put into the menu system everything
> > everybody could ever want, no one would ever find anything.
> > Instead, you choose from a gallery of canned favorites, or create a new
> > one and put it in the menu system where you will find it. You add a
> > tooltip to remind yourself how to use it (and you submit it to the
> > denemo.org website to go into the online gallery).
> > There is a nice development path ahead here: you can describe how to
> > present the LilyPond insert on the Denemo score area, so as to get good
> > feedback as to what you have entered, you can parameterise the LilyPond
> > so that when you click on (press keyboard shortcut for) Guitar Fingering
> > you have a spinner to take the finger number, and much much more...
> > At the moment I've just got this working, integrated with Jean-Rene`s
> > shortcut manager (so your new command appears in the alphabetical order
> > in his table). There is no save, no load from gallery, no restore last
> > sessions menu items (with the last of these it is uesless of course!)
> > But it will work, and would enable us to relegate some of the less
> > popular menu items to a gallery (from whence those interested could
> > fetch them to keep in their own profile, ~/.denemo)
> > Richard
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > 
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> > 
> > 
> 
> 
> 
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