[Pmwiki-users] preview feature ideas

[Patrick R. Michaud]

An often-requested item for PmWiki is to add a "Preview" feature to the
edit page so that authors can preview their changes without saving them.
I definitely would like to implement this, but I need some feedback
from the user community first.

Ideally, my conception of the preview feature is to add a "Preview"
button next to the "Save" and "Edit" buttons on the edit page.  Pressing
"Preview" would cause a preview version of the page to be displayed
somewhere but without saving changes.  Changes would not be saved until
"Save" is actually pressed.  I can come up with a naive implementation
of this fairly easily, but there are a couple of fairly big design
issues that need to be resolved first.  So, the questions I have:

1.  Where should the preview be displayed?
2.  How faithful does the preview version need to be to the final output?

Personally I like the suggestion that a preview version of the page
be displayed beneath just below the EditQuickReference material that
appears beneath the edit box.  In this case, pressing "Preview" would
simply redisplay the Edit Page with the current rendering of the
editing text.

Unfortunately, one of the drawbacks to this approach is that the
preview of the page might not be *exactly* what would appear in the
saved version because some customized headers, footer, and stylesheet
information needed to accurately display the page might not be available
on the edit page.  I don't know how much effect this will have for most
installations, but it is a concern.

Another suggestion is to have the preview appear in an external window,
and pressing "Preview" would open/update an external window containing
the page preview.  I think this suggestion works also, but my big concern
is that someone might mistakenly assume that that the external preview
window actually represents the saved page, and then accidentally
close the edit page without having saved the changes.  That could be 
*really* annoying.

Anyone have any other ideas or suggestions about how to approach this,
or some comments on the above?

Thanks in advance,

Pm