[Libreoffice-ux-advise] color managing in LibO

[Markus Mohrhard]

Hey Alexander,

2012/11/15 Alexander Wilms <alexander.wilms at zoho.com>:
> Hi Markus,
>
> did you take a look at the whiteboard?
> http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Design/Whiteboards/Color_Picker
>
> "While one can argue that
> only a few colors are really necessary it creates big problems in
> interoperability when you get a document that uses colors that we
> don't offer."
>
> We're dealing with issue by having a 'Document colors' view, which would
> show all the colors contained in a document (colors also availbale in the
> palette that's being used in LibO should probably be hidden).

Nice idea. There might be some performance problems with this approach
but we will only find out when we implement this.

>
> "Additionaly we have no way to use ARGB right now in the UI while it is
> supported in the code. So we should find a solution that most likely
> limits the standard color palette but offers an easy way to define
> custom colors."
>
> Nice :). I guess we could add a slider/ spin button to the various panes of
> the custom color view of the mock-up.
>
> "   - toolbar button for font color, cell background color
>        - needs a small pop-up dialog with a button to go to a bigger
> dialog for defining custom colors?"
>
> I guess that's not necessary. If one only wants one or two custom colors it
> should be easy to define them within the popup. If one wants a whole
> palette, one can still use the 'area formatting' dialog and modify/open/save
> palettes.

Depending on how big the color dialog will be in the end we might need
to strip it down.

My idea was to ahve something small with just a few deafult colors and
a few custom colors and for everything else like defining new colors,
... you can through a button in the pop-up get to the real color
dialog.
But in the end this is a decision that has to be done by the UX team
and not by the developers.

>
> " - color button for example in normal dialogs
>        - uses right now a button with the color names"
>
> I think it'd be great if we could use the toolbar-pop within dialogs in
> order to increase consisteny and reduce the duplication of functionality.

That is what I somehow tried to archive with my proposal for the
toolbar popups. Having one dialog with all the features we can use
everywhere and at the toolbar popup where this large dialog is too big
help out by using s smaller dialog and only delegate to the large
dialog if necessary.

>
> Michel Renon even made a prototype if you want to get a feeling of how
> usable this implementation would be:
> http://michel.renon.free.fr/libreoffice/colorpicker_20121112/.
>

Astron mentioned it in the ESC call. Sadly it contains some features
that we don't support. Currently we are limited to ARGB for colors.
And the button for selecting a color by clicking on an object might be
very hard to implement. But this is something that can be discussed
while implementing it.

Thanks a lot for your input.

Regards,
Markus