[Libreoffice-ux-advise] Hiding/Showing the page breaks in writer

[Cedric Bosdonnat]

Hi Christoph,

I'm having a fun hackweek here at SUSE working on a CMIS integration for
LibreOffice (that is to help having it connected with Alfresco,
SharePoint and friends). Thus there won't be any progress on the writer
feature this week.

On Sat, 2011-09-24 at 13:09 +0200, Christoph Noack wrote:
> > I like the color red, but in this case, I still find it to different 
> > compared to the rest of the 'color scheme' (Options > Appearance > Text 
> > Document).
> > I would vote for the 'Manual page break blue' from Calc.
> 
> Consistency is important, yes. Wasn't the color "red" introduced,
> because the dark blue was hardly visible when using the old document
> borders? Now, the blue color would work well again - so indeed it makes
> sense to go back (another reason: red is considered to be a color for
> warnings, blue for information).

Let's go for the blue again...

> Another small refinement - I think the current button interferes a bit
> (only a bit) with the shadow. From my point-of-view, could you move it a
> few pixels to the left?

Well, it'll always interfere with something there... I even plan to make
the button move with the page view to make sure we can always see it.

> Nevertheless, the current "button" might be something people don't want
> to see all the time ... if you remember my proposal [1] of having "fade
> in / out" functionality for the headers/footers, this can solve a bunch
> of problems here, too. For example, for column breaks the button may
> also just appear if the user hovers the red line (e.g. if not knowing
> what this is about). Same for the "side by side" view mode.

The fade in/out thing makes probably more sense here than on the
header/footers thing as the page break indicator is always visible
otherwise.

> The "book mode" has also been addressed in this thread; I propose to
> only draw the line above the page that gets "page breaked", so something
> like that (page break on left page, affects next page):
> 
>         
>         ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~<br
>         +-----------------------------+-------------------------------+
>         |                             |                               |
>         |                             |                               |
>         |                             |                               |
> 

I think we are on the same ideas here.

> One additional thing I'd like to know - Cedric, if we are sure that the
> basic stuff is finished, could we ping / involve the documentation team,
> so that the help texts are adapted accordingly? Just ping me if you
> think its done, then I have a (UX) look at it again, and then we can
> forward the discussion to the doc team - agreed?

I'm not sure this is the final behavior... but we are approaching it.
For example the Fade in/out things may need to be documented... and they
aren't implemented yet.

> > The entry 'Edit Page Break' opens - I expect - the window Paragraph, tab 
> > Text flow?
> 
> Cor: Do you miss another feature here? Like changing the type of the
> page break, or changing the following page style? Note: I'd like to
> avoid stuffing the menus, but if there is something that _really_ helps,
> why not?

The idea I had was to tweak the Insert break dialog and use it for
modifying the page break. I wasn't aware that the Paragraph > Text Flow
tab was showing that information... so it may be interesting to show
that page.

Any thoughts on that?

> > Thanks a lot for all the improvements,
> 
> Cedric, thanks a lot for making Writer a "cool thing" ;-)

You're welcome :)

-- 
Cédric Bosdonnat
LibreOffice hacker
http://documentfoundation.org
OOo Eclipse Integration developer
http://cedric.bosdonnat.free.fr