[Ipe-discuss] define a constant preamble and author

[Otfried Cheong]

Norbert Zeh wrote:
> Having read this, I just remembered how powerful and at the same time
> limited I find the whole stylesheet approach to formatting settings
> across a document.  My main problem is that the default stylesheet that
> is used on start-up is hardwired in the source code, and often one would
> like to change one's default settings.  In fact, Ubuntu's version of Ipe
> has done exactly this by patching the source code and, as a result, I
> could not easily open documents on my Windows machine that were created
> without a special stylesheet on Ubuntu, and vice versa.  

I had a discussion about this with Steve Robbins, who maintains the 
debian package. I didn't know that Ubuntu had actually included this 
misinformed style sheet  patch - that's a serious problem, as they've 
completely broken Ipe compatibility between different systems.  How can 
they be so foolish?  Please file a bug report with Ubuntu.

> * Do not hardwire any style settings into Ipe and define everything in
> loadable stylesheets.  The same way there is a file containing
> information where to find fonts, a default stylesheet can be installed,
> for example, in /usr/share/ipe, and this is the one normally loaded.  A
> user should be able to change which file contains his/her default
> stylesheet by specifying a different file in the Preferences.

The idea behind the standard style sheet was that nothing is hardwired - 
everything in there can be changed.  The main reason it's not empty was 
that people can save the standard style sheet and start editing it.

It didn't occur to me at that time that you would actually want to 
remove items from the style sheet, because you don't want to have 
unwanted options available in the user interface.  I see that now - for 
instance for the figures in our book - and I completely agree that it 
should be changed as you say.

In Ipe 7.  Which will come out next year, when I'm on sabbatical :-)

Otfried