[Openmcl-devel] A question about ticket #400

[Ron Garret]

On Jun 20, 2009, at 9:44 AM, Gail Zacharias wrote:

> At 6/20/2009 12:25 PM, Glen Foy wrote:
>> In browsing the tickets today I came across this:
>>
>> "Define and implement an API for managing text attributes in editor  
>> buffers.
>>
>> It's not a near-term goal to make these text attributes persistent
>> (i.e., to somehow save them with the file, via extended attributes
>> on files or whatever), though it might be worthwhile to keep such a
>> possibility in mind when designing the API."
>>
>>
>> No persistent text attributes??
>
>
> Yeah, here's the thing...  The API can easily provide any number of
> functions such as save/load-buffer-as-html or save/load-buffer-as-rtf
> or
> save/load-buffer-in-home-baked-format-with-font-info-encoded-in-lisp- 
> comments
> or whatever, stuff like that would be trivial to write.  The problem
> is that it's not clear to me what Hemlock should actually do to save
> the attributes, given the reality of living in a unix file
> system.  Any thoughts?

I don't understand what aspect of "the reality of living in a unix  
file system" you think is relevant here.  Is it that if you saved rich  
text as, say, RTF then you couldn't load it without munging the file  
to extract the plain text?  I don't see why that's a problem.  Just  
save rich text as .lisp.rtf and tweak LOAD and COMPILE-FILE to extract  
the plain text from those files instead of loading them raw.  Or am I  
missing something?

rg