[Libreoffice-ux-advise] Enable CTL for Default?

[Stefan Knorr (Astron)]

Hi all,

I enabled CTL/Asian support some time ago and it doesn't bother me
performance-wise. However, the separate font entries in the Paragraph
Style dialogue do bother me quite a bit. I also don't really see the
use for them because (at least in the case of the CTL default) they
lump very different scripts together – most fonts aren't optimised for
both (e. g.) Arabic and Indic scripts.
Thus, if we think this principle through, we would end up with
different pickers for every language – which hopefully no one wants. I
would very much like to only ever see one default font, not three.

(It also adds two more tabs, Asian Typography and Asian Layout to the
same dialogue. It should be simple to add the three options in Asian
Typography as a button on the Font tab. Asian Layout would seem to
topically fit into the Position tab – which is already crammed though,
so that Tab would likely need to stay.)

Then, the Asian option adds the entries Hangul/Hanja Conversion and
Chinese Translation to the Tools→Language menu. These, don't bother me
really.

The other UI thing is that it adds three more pages to the options itself.
The Searching in Japanese page initially comes up with all options
enabled – thus, it might make sense to think about whether people
really need such granular control over these options or if we could
maybe make it all a single option (I am not Japanese, obviously, so I
am guessing wildly here). [NB: all the options are also available in
Find & Replace next to the tick box "Sounds like".]

Keeping most of the options for Asian Layout seems like a good idea to
me, but the Beginning and End Character settings, we can probably also
conclude the right thing to do from the default language setting, no?
As for the options under Conmplex Text Layout:
* Sequence Checking sounds like an option that's useful to keep;
* I am not sure about Cursor Movement, but I've tried the options and
"visual" seems to behave rather buggy – if it weren't it would likely
be the best option
* the "Digits" option: it could find a new home in the Languages tab
or it could be removed completely, with it being set to "Context"
always

This way, we could probably compress all the relevant options to a
single additional options page (instead of three) – which would lower
the UI impact immediately.

Conclusion: if we could adapt the UI as outlined, it would be great if
we could always enable CJK/CTL support.

Regards,

Astron.