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

[Christoph Noack]

Hi Regina, Cedric, Cor, Olivier ... or simply: the hiding/showing page
breaks in writer special interest group ;-)

I'm back from the "Bug Submission Assistant" ... and more than happy
about the recent progress in Writer :-)))

Am Freitag, den 23.09.2011, 23:32 +0200 schrieb Cor Nouws:
> Hi Cedric,
> 
> Cedric Bosdonnat wrote (23-09-11 21:11)
> > Here is a screenshot of what I currently have implemented for the page
> > break indicator. Any opinion on that?
> >
> > http://img809.imageshack.us/img809/4223/pagebreaks.png

Cool, that's surely great! Can't wait to try it out...

> 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).

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?

> The (red) arrow/button: are there some basic principles that are 
> followed in designing this?
> There will definitely be more elements in the future - quite some 
> changes in Impress also recently - so consistency would be useful.

True, I think this is where "we" (the Design Team) need to write down an
Interaction Pattern, so that it can be re-used easily (and
consistently). The current drop-down resembles (or: should resemble) the
behavior of the Notes options menu or the new header/footer page breaks.
Still, many stuff is open like mouse-overs, "is active"
visualization", ...

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 "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
        +-----------------------------+-------------------------------+
        |                             |                               |
        |                             |                               |
        |                             |                               |


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?

> 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?

> Thanks a lot for all the improvements,

Cedric, thanks a lot for making Writer a "cool thing" ;-)

Cheers,
Christoph

[1]
http://www.mail-archive.com/libreoffice-ux-advise@lists.freedesktop.org/msg00009.html