Perhaps I Underestimated...

So the other day I happily wrote, code the footnotes module. That will go fast; most of the code can be lifted out of version 1 and needs only a wash and brush-up to use the V2 APIs.

So, not quite. The version 1 module is 1200 lines of fairly complex code which I haven't looked at in a year. I want to break this up into a "model" module and a "view" module. So I have to figure out which bits to copy into the model and which into the view. That's pretty clear, thanks to my generally readable and structured coding style, but still takes thought. And defining an API between them, one that will be logically clean and maintainable, but also will not add needless overhead to slow operations down in a large book.

There will be big chunks of code that can be copy/pasted, but even those lines will need individual editing.

What does carry over is the general logical structure and methods. For example the code to find footnotes took some time to work out originally, but I can reuse the logic flow. It goes like this, approximately:

Scan all the lines in the document looking for footnote[*] "anchors"[B] like those.
    Save them as a list of QTextCursor objects that select just the Key strings ("*" and "B")
Scan all the lines in the document looking for "^\[Footnote (Key):..." 
    For each, find the end of the note, defined as the next line that ends with "]"
    Save them as a list of QTextCursor objects that select the line(s) of each Note
Merge the two lists matching the Key of each Anchor to the first matching Note after it
    Remove the cursors for matched notes from their lists and
        add the (anchor, note) pair of cursors to the database as an item
    Insert the remaining unmatched Anchors in the database as (anchor, None)
    Insert the remaining unmatched Notes in the database as (None, Note)

Everything the view displays to the user in a 6-column table can be derived from the two QTextCursors, and QTextDocument keeps the QTextCursors updated as the user edits.

What takes time is that this code needs to be brought into a class definition, because each Book has its own Footnote database object. (Remember: allowing multiple books open changes everything.) So all of what are global variables in V1 become self.variables in V2. And I generally change camelCase names (other than Qt interface names) to under_score_names. So everything gets edited and moved.

So not really a "wash and brush-up" but more like a "strip it to the studs and put in all new wallboard and floor tile" remodel. 'twill take a few days. Satisfying work, though.