[Libreoffice-ux-advise] drawing toolbar interactions

[Regina Henschel]

Hi Federico,

Federico Mena Quintero schrieb:
> On Wed, 2011-07-20 at 17:23 +0200, Regina Henschel wrote:
>
> Thanks to everyone for their replies.  I'll reply to various quotes.
>
>  From Regina:
>
>> I know, I'm not a "normal" user, but I see no problem in the current
>> behavior. It is a nice feature in Draw and Impress, that *I* can decide,
>> whether I will use a tool permanently or not.
>
> The problem is a bit compound.
>
> First - If you make the drawing tools switch back to the Selection tool
> by default, that makes the drawing workflow cumbersome *if* you don't
> know that you needed to double-click the toolbar button.  (This is
> buried in the Help (which no one reads) - I stumbled upon it by
> accident, when trying to find the logic behind those "bPermanent" code
> paths in the source).

I still disagree with changing the behavior. In my workflow I would get 
a lot of additional clicks.
Example of my typical tasks: Draw a filled polygon with three points, 
add an arc in one corner, add a text with character 'alpha', drag-select 
all, group it, copy&paste it to Writer.

>
> Second - LibreOffice seems to be done to give preference to putting text
> inside shapes.  This is actually quite nice when you are doing diagrams
> like flowcharts, with text inside simple shapes - but it gets in your
> way when you are trying to draw anything else.  As I use the drawing
> tools in Impress, they frequently switch to the blinking text cursor.
> This may be due to my "sloppy clicking", but I think *that* comes as a
> result of me wanting to draw shapes when I've been switched back to the
> Selection tool inadvertently.
>
> (When I've seen my wife - who is definitely not a technical user - try
> to draw things in Impress, she has often run into the same problem.  So
> my usage pattern is not unique.)

I see no connection to the problem "sticky tools by single click". I get 
no such problem with texts. Perhaps the default settings are not 
suitable for you? Open the toolbar 'Options'. You find three icons to 
control the access to text edit mode. I have only "Double-click to edit 
text" on. Or do you try to use the textbox tool, while an object is 
selected?

>
> I think we can make the drawing tools have a simpler user model, simpler
> code, and more predictable behavior.
>
> Inkscape suits me fine.  I played a bit more with it, and here's its
> behavior:
>
> 1. You select a drawing tool; it gets highlighted in the toolbar.
>
> 2. You can press-drag-release to draw.  This leaves the shape you just
> drew selected; you can of course tweak its handles then.

That is no difference to "not sticky".

>
> 3. The current tool stays selected until you switch to another tool.

But you need an additional click when you will drag-select a set of objects.

>
> 4. If a drawing tool is selected, and you single-click on an existing
> shape in your drawing (i.e. press+release without dragging in the
> middle), that shape gets selected.  This is a shortcut so that you don't
> need to switch back to the Selection tool if the only thing you want to
> do is select a shape.

That will not work for the textbox-tool, because the textbox-tool is 
immediately in text edit mode after a single click and needs no dragging.

>
> 5. You can toggle back and forth between the current tool and the
> Selection tool by hitting the Spacebar (this is quite nice; even Corel
> Draw had this behavior, and it lets you draw-tweak-draw-tweak in an
> efficient fashion).

Such a new "remember last tool" feature would be possible without 
default sticky mode too.


Kind regards
Regina