[scribus] Outline

[Barry McKenna]

On 4/17/2011 3:34 PM, Marie and Paul Di Somma wrote:
> On 17 Apr 2011 15:16:24 -0700, Barry McKenna wrote:
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>
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> "Actually, since there would often be more than one "object"
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> in the "Document Structure" the name would be more appropriately "Document
> Objects Structure.""
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> I suggest "Document objects structure" is a noun string.
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> Document structure I understand.
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> Document Objects
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> I understand.
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> But "Document Objects Structure" makes no sense to me.
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>
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> BTW, I come from a technical writing
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> background.
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> Paul Di Somma

Paul, I appreciate the feedback. My work involves attempting 
to make the incomprehensible, the profound, more accessible, 
so if what I suggest is not intelligible to you, then I 
would appreciate a little more specificity than "no sense." 
I happen to live in a very progressive small town where 
there are numerous people still who have not made the 
conceptual 'leap' to using/owning a computer, even if just 
for browsing the internet.

Language can be a tool or an obstruction. My experience is 
that, as you imply, too often language is an impediment to 
learning and understanding.

The concepts of object-oriented programming underwent - and 
still are undergoing - many heuristic evolutions.

With Scribus, and in this list - to which I have not been a 
major contributor - one of the most frequent requests for 
help, as they appear to me, are implicitly help in 
conceptualization of features of Scribus. There are many 
parts of Scribus that I have not made use of and so those 
parts are usually unintelligible to me because I have not 
yet put my hands or my mind on them, or as happens 
sometimes, I have yet to fully grok the culture of Scribus 
or of Electronic publishing (one of my former employers in 
the business hated the term desktop publishing).

So I would appreciate how Document Objects Structure makes 
no sense to you.

I see the issue of this program feature/menu item as 
comprised of three fundamental components:

1. A Document
2. Components that are used to build the document, which I 
have suggested can be heuristically aided by the concept of 
Objects which have properties and methods.
3. Accessing the program feature/menu item will result in 
the display of a dialog of the Structure of the Objects in 
the Document.

So, literally, "The Structure of the Objects in the 
Document" is what we are discussing, in terms of 
conceptually arriving at a feature name/menu item to use for 
both understanding and using Scribus, and for discussing 
various of these issues.

I can appreciate the issue of adjective-noun strings, and/or 
of noun strings that contain numerous nouns, but for me 
anyway, the three here are concise, in terms of a menu item, 
and with less than these three we would not be offering as 
much of an aid in conceptualizing how to consider a Scribus 
document.

However, if those who have been "building" the code and the 
conceptualization of Scribus these many years think that the 
concept of objects does not offer additional heuristic 
value, then Document Structure might be their preference as 
well.

For me, the concept of considering discrete sections of code 
having both properties and methods was a watershed - and at 
times a painful one - in terms of designing my own software. 
The authors of Scribus and other users such as yourself may 
not see any value of the concept of objects for users in 
this instance. However, the idea arose for me because the 
term "objects" was used four times in Greg's wiki on the 
"Outline."

Barry McKenna