Write
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Description & Goals
Summary
The Write activity serves as the basic text editing application on the laptops. Its simple interface provides an easy starting point for children, presenting tools that make writing a story, poem or essay simple and straightforward. It also supports basic tools for inserting images, creating tables, and performing basic layout operations as children begin to require some of these features often associated with word processors.
Current Use & Goals
How do you save it?
- Your work is automatically saved in the Journal as "Write Activity" or the name you last gave it.
How do you name it?
- Click the Activity tab and overwrite the words "Write activity" with the name you want displayed in the Journal.
When should you use the "Keep" button in the Activity tab?
- When you want to save in another format or location. (?)
How do you save to a new location, such as an SD card or USB device?
- Name the document, then "keep" to Journal and exit. Open Journal. Find your freshly written document. Click, hold the button down, and drag the document name to the bottom of Journal. Release when the pointer is over the icon for your SD card or USB storage device.
How do you spellcheck a document? (Future version?)
How to transfer a Write document to Word?
- Currently, an XO Write document can not be opened by Microsoft Word without problems. To transfer from the XO, first "keep" the document as plain text. To transfer TO the XO, you can create a document in MS Word or another program and save it as plain text.
- Write's Keep command also offers the alternatives of saving as HTML or RTF, both of which should preserve font characteristics and page layout. Plain text saves only the words and paragraph breaks, but often is a "good enough" solution. (The RTF alternative was not functioning on at least some of the G1G1 XOs in December 2007. See discussion.)
- XO Write's parent program, AbiWord, may help if you have a Windows, Mac,or Linux PC. You should be able to open XO Write documents in AbiWord, then save in RTF or MS Word ".doc" format. See http://www.abisource.com/download/
Collaboration
Write will feature collaborative real time editing. Integrated with the mesh network and presence services, this feature will allow kids to work together easily and seamlessly in a text editing environment. This feature is made possible via the Abi Collab research performed by the Abiword development team.
Visual Design
Media
| Document | Description |
|---|---|
| Activity Mockup (2MB) history | Adobe Illustrator file containing mockups for each toolbar |
Screenshots
21Jan2008 -- These pictures are really misleading: 1) They are not "Screenshots" 2) They do not accurately show the program screens. -- SFDave
Development
Feature Requests
Microsoft Word capability
- Write (Abiword) already supports .doc; Journal support for "save as" needs to be exposed in the interface.
Publish Function
- Publish to PDF for Final Output
- Publish to HTML/XHTML
Double spacing in the format section
Implementation Discussion
Version History
Source
http://dev.laptop.org/git.do?p=projects/write
RPMs
Resources
Functional Test
Open the Write activity.
Type some text. Change the font. Ensure that bold and underline work properly.
Save the document.
Close the activity; ensure that it closes properly.