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

[Daniel Mania]

Hei hei!

Why do we "need to keep being compatible" with Microsoft Office at all? 
1) Users who switch from Microsoft Office do that for a reason and they 
should expect some differences!
2) Document compatibility is a great idea, but until Microsoft Office 
import works well enough, there is no point in cluttering up LibreOffice 
with "legacy options". Anything more complicated than "Hello world" gets 
messed up after importing it from MSO into LibreOffice.
As far as I know, there is a project working on Microsoft Office import 
for OpenOffice, but I am pretty sure that will take a while. Until then, 
most people are probably happy to get to see the textual content of an 
MSO document. For everything else there is PDF (or even a parallel MSO 
installation, if you are working in a bigger company).

How about cleaning up the LibreOffice interface, before introducing 
additional elements? There are still smaller inconsistencies like the 
table border button, which is only a pull down menu without a separate 
pull down menu arrow and an "apply current setting" button next to each 
other. Or the two different types of rectangle and circle shapes in Calc 
and Writer ... Even though many of the other irregularities have been 
cleaned up already.

Sorry for these blunt words, but I don't think that tiptoeing around MS 
is such a good idea. Neither to attract new users or please companies 
that are under Microsoft's spell, nor to satisfy old 
LibreOffice/OpenOffice users.


Greetings,
Daniel M



On 19.11.2012 9:23, Cedric Bosdonnat wrote:> On Sun, 2012-11-18 at 17:44 
+0100, Michael Stahl wrote:
 >>> 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.
 >
 > Restricting sounds good, but pay attention with Word and Excel: they
 > have different sets of possible borders & width (Word had quite a lot
 > more) and as Michael wrote it, we need to keep being compatible with
 > both of them (and legacy borders) which is quite a mess.
 >
 > --
 > Cedric
 >
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