Re: [tdf-discuss] UI proposal

Le 2010-11-01 12:59, Johannes Bausch a écrit :
> > Why "page setup" is outside "stiles"? One of the killer features on
> > Writer is page styles (Word do not have them).
> That's just dummy text, I didn't realize it... of course "Page" should
> also come as category for the stylesheets. Of course this is a killer
> feature. You setup page font size once and have everything inherit it
> from the page stuff.
But Page Setup is partly outside Styles and should work like other 
styles. For instance:
– In Writer, page styles cannot be linked to a base styles. Tweaking 
header spacing in First Page, Odd Pages and Even Pages is therefore 
rather painful.
– In Calc, there are page styles (not linked to base styles as far as I 
remember). But there is something with header and footer definition that 
is counter-intuitive.
– In Impress and Draw, there are no page styles. Draw would be a good 
candidate for dual commands: page size vs drawing size.
> > I think there should be an option for that on every drop down menu.
> > For example, on character styles for "Font" you could have, on top of
> > the font list, two options:
> > - From parent style
> > - From paragraph style
> That's duplicate. Where's the difference between parent and paragraph?
> Why can't paragraph be a parent? Obviously a paragraph can only be a
> parent to another paragraph style (and not to, e.g. a heading), but
> e.g. the page (which has no such things as paragraph styles) can be
> parent to everything.
> Another disadvantage of having individual parents would be that you
> get non-transparent inheritance. You could think of having each
> category inherit from a separate parent, though.
I see a difference between both. For example, one might want to apply 
the character style "Accented text" on the character style "Hypertext 
link" (to get the hyperlink in italics) on the character style 
"SansSerif" (to use the font Helvetica)... all that in a paragraph 
styled "Bibliography" which would have Times as its default font.

> > and the font size could have a check box for "Proportional": right now
> > it is not easy for new users to discover that you can simply delete a
> > point size and type a percentage to get a proportionally sized font.
> In the dropdown to the right you can select "%" instead of "pt".
>
> > I rather think that it should be more clear on documentation that
> > images are inserted on frames than to create a new category of styles
> > for images.
> Again, "images" was just a dummy. Still, you might want to consider a
> style for an image container, including image caption style - this is
> still painful in OO.
>
> > Even if I like the concept, I can see one big problem: most users will
> > end with lots of repeated, unneeded styles!
> That's true. Any ideas how to prevent cluttering the style list?
One suggestion might be to keep all characteristics such as "paragraph 
level" "numbering type" and "numbering level" as available options for 
styles, yet not define default styles (or most default styles anyway). 
It would be similar to the approach used by InDesign, a commercial 
desktop publishing software (its approach to styles has other flaws, but 
that's another subject). So, for instance, one could define a style 
called "TheTitleNumber6" (or whatever name suits one's fancy), with 
hierarchical level 6, a given font and paragraph spacing. For the sake 
of simplicity, there could be 5 or 6 basic styles such as Body Text, 
Headings 1 to 4 defined as default, or they might even simply be defined 
in the "default document" and therefore entirely customizable. In my 
case, I would keep all heading levels, but only one style for numbering 
and one for bullets (after all, there are levels within it).


ANOTHER SUGGESTION

Would it help the use of styles if the base style information were to be 
present in the Character, Paragraph and numbering dialogue boxes ? For 
example, when I select "Format –> Paragraph", I would get displayed near 
the top that it is based upon the "Body Text" paragraph format and there 
would even be a button to reapply the base style.

--

Michel Gagnon – michel@mgagnon.net <mailto:michel@mgagnon.net>
Montréal (Québec, Canada) – mgagnon.net <http://mgagnon.net>


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