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

[Daniel Mania]

Your reasoning makes sense and I realize that I might have to live with 
that :-)

In normal writing, you will not encounter any problems with the current 
formatting behavior. But in scientific writing (biology, chemistry, ...) 
there are a lot of sub- and superscripts and that can be troublesome. I 
find myself undoing a formatting, marking a single character and 
re-applying the formatting on only that character quite often.
Also, marking a whole word can be quickly done by double clicking it. So 
the current behavior is not really a time saver.

As I said, your reasoning is sound. And if I am the only one who does 
not like the current formatting behavior ...

Greetings,
Daniel M


On 7.8.2012 9:58, Mirek M. wrote:
 > 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.



On 7.8.2012 9:58, Mirek M. wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 6, 2012 at 1:14 PM, Daniel Mania <daniel.mania at umb.no
> <mailto: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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