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

[Mirek M.]

On Mon, Aug 6, 2012 at 1:14 PM, Daniel Mania <daniel.mania at umb.no> wrote:

> 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 %.
>

The reasoning behind this behavior is that the user isn't likely to start
typing in the middle of a word, and therefore it makes more sense to format
the word the cursor is in instead of formatting only the letters typed
inside the word. Honestly, I can't think of a use case where the user would
want to type inside a word he typed before, but using different formatting
from the rest of the word.
The current behavior makes it easier to format words -- instead of
painstakingly selecting a word, the user can simply click anywhere inside
that word to apply some formatting.
This may not sound like a huge time-saver, but if one does all his
formatting in one go, perhaps to highlight some keywords, it makes things
much more efficient.
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