IBID'S EDITOR
WARNING! THIS SOFTWARE IS NOT YET READY FOR PRODUCTION USE. IT MAY EAT YOUR CONTENT. IT CERTAINLY WILL CONTAIN SURPRISES IN ITS USER INTERFACE. These problems will be dealt with in the future.
Ibid's Editor is an editor for xanalogical text, which is, so to
speak, hypertext on steroids. For a good introduction to xanalogical
text and its principles, look at Theodor Holm Nelson, "Xanalogical
Structure, Needed Now More than Ever: Parallel Documents, Deep Links
to Content, Deep Versioning, and Deep Re-Use", ACM Computing Surveys
31(4), December 1999,
http://www.cs.brown.edu/memex/ACM_HypertextTestbed/papers/60.html
Ibid's Editor implements the following features of xanalogical text:
- transclusions
- content links (a.k.a. xanalogical links)
- parallel document views ("poor man's transpointing windows")
Ibid's Editor is missing the following xanalogical features currently:
- versioning
- true transpointing windows
Ibid's Editor does not have a polished user interface yet.
Some usage notes:
- An IE file contains multiple documents. The document that is currently displayed in one of the editor panes is selected using the combo box beside the New button above that pane. A document can currently be displayed in only one pane at a time.
- Multiple open files are supported: each has its own window. A file can currently be opened at most once in an editor instance.
- After opening a file, it may seem as if nothing happened. That is an illusion only; after opening a file, you should be able to select a document using the abovementioned combo boxes.
- You can create a new document by clicking on one of the New buttons. The choice of button affects in which pane the new document is opened.
- Standard X copy/cut/paste operations work, but they do not create transclusions.
- To create a transclusion, use the special transclusion copy/cut/paste operations you can find in the context menu (press the right-hand button on your mouse).
- To create a content link, select one of the intended endpoint contents and then select 'Copy transclusion' from the context menu. Then select the other intended endpoint content and then select 'Create content link' from the context menu. A dialog opens, in which you will be able to choose which content is the source and which is the target, and to give a description to the link. When done, click on OK.
- Transclusions are visible when both panes show a document; those parts of each document that are transcluded from the other are in italics and blue.
- Content link source content is underlined and blue. Clicking on it opens a dialog box that allows you to choose which of the documents that contain the target content should be opened. After opening it, the target content is doubly underlined.
Build-time dependencies:
- GNU Make
- gcc >= 3.1
- gtk+ >= 2.6
- libglade >= 2.4
- zlib
- some POSIX functionality
Run-time dependencies (excluding any shared library dependencies):
- A working, cryptographically secure /dev/random
Optional run-time dependencies:
- /proc/sys/random/boot_id
- NOTE
- Make sure that the output of pkg-config --libs libglade-2.0 includes -Wl,--export-dynamic on your system.