[Libreoffice-ux-advise] Change LibreOffice's behavior of how formatting is applied

[Daniel Mania]

Hei hei!

Some time ago I filed a bug report (ID 46517) about LibreOffice's 
subscript/superscript behavior. This report got closed and I would like 
to discuss it here instead and also expand it to formatting in general.

Currently, if the user activates any formatting (e.g. "Text bold"), the 
outcome depends on the cursor position:

a)
If the cursor is "inside" a word (behind first character and in front of 
last character), the whole word will be formatted (even though it is 
unmarked).

b)
If the cursor is anywhere else, only newly typed characters will be 
formatted.


This is another example of how LibreOffice forces the user to think 
about the outcome of an action depending on the current situation. And 
you might know by now that I "kind of dislike" this. ;-)

Now I would like to know if I am "a special case", or if we should 
change the formatting behavior to:

"After a formatting was invoked, only affect newly typed characters at 
the cursor position."
Of course this only applies if no characters were marked before.


"bfoman" stated that the current behavior is the default in MS Word 
2010, but in MS Word 2007, formatting works like I would expect (and 
proposed) it. An old version of LibreOffice (3.3.4) already shows that 
behavior and I do not know since when it exists. This might be a "big" 
change if it is an ancient way to handle formatting. On the other side 
it might be something that would not matter to 99.9 % of the users, but 
changing it would please the remaining 0.1 %.


Greetings,
Daniel M