Proofing Plugin

Another bright idea came to mind today... One of my developers asked how s/he could insert comments right next to the words/statements s/he was commenting about (hence the reason I couldn't use the CommentPlugin, at least that I could tell.) much like a proof reader does when proofing a body of text.

Got any ideas on this one? Could I use the CommentPlugin in this form? Please enlighten me!

-- GreggLowrimore - 27 Mar 2002

Update: After some rambling, I thought of a (rather cumbersome) way -- see the third bullet in the third paragraph below. Here is a variation of the link to the comment: rhk01. (Just to prove (to myself, if no one else), that the link does move you to a different part of the document when clicked.)

Original Comment: Offhand I can't think of a good way. Of course anyone could edit the page to insert comments, possibly in italic, bold, or bold italic. To help in finding such comments, you could view the diff. Unfortunately, the diff is a little harder to spot the changes than I would like -- I'd prefer to see what I call a word style diff, where deletions are shown crossed out and additions are shown in bold, for example.

I like Word (97)'s approach to this -- I forget all the details of how to set it up (maybe you basically lock the document?), but you can set up a word document for review. Then, when any reviewer adds a comment, it is shown in a color which indicates which reviewer made the comment, shows a comment marker (IIRC, something like a colored footnote marker), and, if you hover over the comment marker, you see a bubble containing the text of the comment. (IIRC, there are some alternate ways of viewing the comments.)

After all that rambling, to summarize:

• I don't know of a good way at present
• It looks like an area for potential enhancement in TWiki
• Hmm, I guess links could be set up (manually, at least at first) to comments in other sections of the document, something like this: 1

-- RandyKramer - 28 Mar 2002

A Heading for a Comment

Just a test comment to see if the approach of creating a link something like a footnote works.

Yup, it works! A little cumbersome -- its usefulness probably depends on how many comments you want to insert.

A variation (I think Word97 actually does this) would be to use comment markers that include the reviewer's initials and a sequential number, like rhk01.

I linked this particular test comment to a heading, because a heading is automatically an anchor, made by taking the text of the heading and replacing all spaces and punctuation with underbars "_", and limiting the length to 32 characters (IIRC).

There is a way to create an anchor manually (i.e., without using a heading), but I don't recall how to do that. (It's probably on one of the "text formatting rules" pages -- try searching Google for [site:twiki.org anchor format] -- ahh, looks like it's discussed on AutomaticNamedAnchorLinks (which is not in the Google search results), but which I found from ArbitraryTextForWikiWordLinks (which is in the Google search results).)

If this is a satisfactory way to do this, I imagine a plugin could be developed to automate this. (But not by me, unless we want it in Turbo Pascal, Algol, or something similarly ancient.

-- RandyKramer - 28 Mar 2002

I am developing the NotePlugin that could satisfy your needs. It is an extension of the comment plugin.

-- FrancoBagnoli - 28 Mar 2002