[Libreoffice-ux-advise] 2 Suggestions for improving the handling of Pictures in LO

[Michael Meeks]

Hi Ralph,

On Sat, 2012-06-02 at 14:28 +0200, Ralph Aichinger wrote:
> I hope it is not impolite to post UX suggestions to this list.

	It's really designed for developers to ask UX designers for input, and
to improve that interaction.

> 1) It is much too easy to change the aspect ratio of a picture.

	Completely agreed; IIRC last time there was a suggestion to change the
default re-size mode to keeping the aspect ratio, and to make
'shift-resize' mangle it - a number of people objected.

	To me that'd be an obvious slam-dunk change but ... ;-) perhaps we can
re-discuss that here - it seems to me that people very often do this,
and then move on - only coming back later to discover the distortion,
and having lost the real aspect ration in the meantime.

> There is really no scenario where you want to distort a photo
> by changing width and height out of sync, except maybe making

	The question is "what is a photo" ? :-) a .jpeg ? but the file type is
not necessary close-to the picture, etc. And over-complicating this to
make it work differently for different picture types would perhaps cause
more problems than the cure ;-)

> 2) There are four anchor types: To page, to paragraph, to
> character and As character. What bothers me, is that
> the picture moves if I click through these selections. Except
> in the last case, this should not be necessary. If I switch
> say from "To page" to "To paragraph", LO could "transform
> coordinates" and simply keep the object on the same place,
> and fill in new values for coordinates accordingly. Would that
> be too complicated ?

	Patches much appreciated here :-) the experience sounds extremely
sensible to me - having said that it is quite possible that the
algorithm to calculate retaining the exact position is unfeasibly hard
to implement. Trying to make the (iterative) layout calculate itself
backwards to get that precisely right sounds like it might be extremely
hard.

	Do you use to-page anchoring much ? it's one of the features that
causes serious problems with writer layout complexity.

	Thanks !

		Michael.

-- 
michael.meeks at suse.com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot