[Libreoffice-ux-advise] Advice required on auto text resize (Impress)

[Daniel Mania]

Hei hei!

I agree with Mirek and think "Autofit" should be removed or optional 
(with the default being "off").
And I don't think we have to take exporting presentations to PPTX into 
consideration. The export to Microsoft Office is so bad (yes I know, 
it's Microsoft's fault!) that text size is the least problem here.

"Autofit" is nice for beginners, but I wouldn't want to end up with a 
presentation with different text size on each slide! That just looks 
horribly unprofessional.
And fiddling around with content to fit on a slide is _not_ "a massive 
pain in the backside", it's a part of the job of making a presentation. 
The presenter has to think about what to present actively! It's the user 
who has to do the work, not some "LibreOffice magic" ...

 From own experience, LibreOffice documents have to be opened in 
LibreOffice. The export to Microsoft Office does not work for any kind 
of document and whenever I had to deliver something in Microsoft format, 
I had to re-format everything or even re-create the document (Calc -> 
Excel anyone? ;-). When I had to give smaller presentations, I exported 
my work to PDF. For bigger presentations I had to work with Powerpoint 
from the very beginning. This is the real world and there is nothing 
LibreOffice can change about it.

And again, why does LibreOffice have to behave like Microsoft Office? If 
people don't have the money for Microsoft Office, they should be happy 
to get a well functioning free Office package! If they have Microsoft 
Office, but are not satisfied, they obviously want to have something 
different!

Sorry for being so emotional, I don't want to offend anyone! It's just 
that I am having a really bad time at work, with my bosses getting angry 
at me every time they see me using LibreOffice. And whenever one comes 
to a conference, there is only Microsoft Office ... and if you try to 
install a portable version of LibreOffice, you are the devil himself!
Again, LibreOffice should go its own way and be proud of it! There are 
so many things that were copied from Microsoft, and they are actually 
what makes Microsoft Office so annoying! Get rid of "automatic" 
annoyances and give a damn about interoperability, at least as long as 
the export to Microsoft formats does not work 110 % well!

Greetings,
Daniel M




On 8.10.2012 11:10, Michael Meeks wrote:
>
> On Sun, 2012-10-07 at 11:07 +0200, Mirek M. wrote:
>>          I think this autofit feature is very disturbing if you are not
>>          aware of it. From my point of view it should be removed
>>          because if what you are writing does not fit in the available
>>          room, you should write less words or add room (split the text
>>          on another
>
> 	So - this is a nice idea. However - manually doing that is a massive
> pain in the backside for the (non expert) slide creator. Of course,
> ideally people should not be trying to cram their text onto slides - but
> reality suggests they do.
>
> 	People tend to manually fiddle / re-word their slides to cram text in -
> leaving not a pixel left for another character ;-)
>
> 	Then - they save that as .pptx import it on a different machine, with
> different fonts and if the lines are re-wrapped - that inevitably pushes
> their later bullets off the bottom of the slide, and then they get angry
> [ seeing it often only as they present ].
>
> 	That IMHO is a -massive- UX drop-off; far worse than some transient
> confusion about what font size to show in the toolbar while editing.
> Having said that, I'd personally prefer to have some relative font
> sizing shown there generally based on the style - but ... I'm mad like
> that ;-)
>
>> Also, if we have to keep autofit, it should be disabled for an object
>> if the user overwrites the autofit size using the font size picker.
>
> 	Autofit is an interop feature; IMHO we have to keep it - if only to
> interoperate with those who turned it on in MS Office.
>
> 	IMHO it should also be the default ~everywhere so we improve
> interoperability generally - but ... ;-> if it behaves strangely, we
> should fix that.
>
> 	ATB,
>
> 		Michael.
>