User:Camillem/MyDrafts

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Visual indicators for Layout

Introduction

Setting the layout in fairly easy, once you know how it works. But it could be made even more obvious and straightforward ; this would be especially usefull when the page break is a property of a table, as most of the users wouldn't have the idea to look for this there.

Basic principle

Making page breaks more obvious, with a way to manipulate them directly. Those indicators would show/hide just like the other non printing characters.

VisualIndicatorsForLayout.png

Web search Toolbar

Introduction

OOo has a cool Web search toolbar : it's the "Hyperlink bar" toolbar. It provides nice functionnality : the search box can be automatically filled with the selected text, and you can choose among different search engines, that are settable in the options and I guess, by an extension.

But...

  • The list of default search engines could be improved: Excite throws a server error, Wikipedia is missing, and we could also imagine linking to online translation services, etc.

Change proposal

  • Create from this toolbar a "Websearch" toolbar, without the link insertion capabilities ;
    • as it would be much smaller, it could be displayed by default
  • I think that "Hyperlink bar" could then even be removed as the link insertion capability is redundant with the complete and convenient "Hyperlink" dialog that can be directly called from the standard toolbar.


Before

Hyperlinkbar.png

After

Websearchbar.png

Technical details

Unfortunately, this change is not as easy as it could seem. Mathias Bauer explained :

There are two ways to implement that feature: convert the hyperlink bar into a "regular toolbar" or extend the SfxChildWindow based implementations to support toolbars. Probably the latter would be a waste of time as the code is planned to be replaced. For a "regular toolbar" all code currently in the hyperlink bar class must be moved into the controllers - a quite challenging task.

Depending on the knowledge of the developer a rough estimation for the effort would be 3-4 weeks. Too much for me to start that task now.

But he nuanced:

There could be another option that came up when I discussed the problem with Carsten Driesner: what if we could "bundle" the three controls into a common parent window (transparent and with no borders so that the "sub controls" completely fill it) and use that one as the toolbar control? All code currently in the hyperlink bar itself could be moved to that new control. This control then could be added to any "regular" toolbar as usual. That would be doable in much shorter time. Worth thinking

about it...

Revamping the Styles & Formating Window

The idea would be incremental "better than nothing" steps : that means changes that wouldn't disrupt users and that would be cheap to implement.

First Step : Tabization

The first step is to create logical groups of the different elements. It just clarifies the way the window works without changing user interaction (he click at the same places as before).

Step 1 Tabization.png

Second Step : Explicit commands

The second step is to move icons in a more convenient place and to redefine their actions :

  • Icon "Add" adds a new style ; the triangle beneath opens a menu (Or if it's simpler : icons and triangle open the menu.):
    • Add new style,
    • create style from selection,
    • Load styles.


  • Icon "Edit" edit the current style ; the triangle beneath opens a menu :
    • Edit style,
    • update style from selection
  • Icon "Delete" deletes current style

It would imply to change a little bit the user interaction, but icons are more explicit than the existing ones (actually, the Galaxy icons are already quite similar to these ones).

Step 2 Commands.png

Print ranges

mockup for Editing print ranges, after Regina's proposal


PrintRangeMockup cm 1.png

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