[Libreoffice-ux-advise] simplifying the border width settings

[Michael Stahl]

On 18/11/12 12:52, Markus Mohrhard wrote:
> Hey,
> 
> currently we have a large set of problems around borders that are to a
> big deal caused by our too complex border behavior. In several bugs I
> already mentioned that IMHO the only sane solution is to limit the
> border width to maybe 3 or 4 different values that we can both control
> in the view and in the export to PDF and to the printer. This would
> also help to simplify the border handling in the cod beetween the
> different applications.

you are not the first one to notice:
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/libreoffice-ux-advise/2012-August/001350.html

> Currently we support defining the border  width between 0.05 pts and
> something like 10 pts (everything above 2pts is anyway too thick) but
> displaying these borders creates several problems due to antialising
> (fixed in 4.0 through disabling of border antialising) and that until
> 3.6 the view did some ugly hacks that showed wrong border widths in
> the view and used the right ones when printing.

hmm probably best to have anti-aliasing disabled, indeed that had a big
chance of looking ugly.
i think this view/print problem only existed in Calc.

> I propose to simplify this and limit the values to HAIRLINE, THIN,
> MEDIUM and THICK with sensible values and map the old values to them.
> This should not be such a big problem because until 3.6 at least the
> UI behaved in a similar way due to a bug.

i don't think that is enough - users may want to import existing
documents from OOo or MS Office and create new borders in them that
match the existing ones in the document; so it would probably be a good
idea to offer those widths which these applications can easily set in
the UI, which is a bit more than 3 of each style.

but the general approach sounds good.