[Libreoffice-ux-advise] Advice on adding Smart-Art related settings

[Jacobo Aragunde Pérez]

El 02/10/13 16:45, Jan Holesovsky escribió:
> ...
>
> Just so that this does not lead to confusion - SmartArt being a real
> group shape is a relatively recent fix:
>
>
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/commit/?id=59373b753902f69cd44d183568b084429322e7ab
>
> In the previous versions it has been broken into individual shapes which
> is the worst of all options from my point of view - but having a group
> shape that the user has to explicitly ungroup to do his/her
> modifications + drop the smartart metadata with this ungroup operation
> seems reasonably valid to me (if we have undo for that, that is).
>

Just a side note: this patch affects to .ppt importing, SmartArt was
already being imported as shape groups in Writer. These shape groups
cannot be exported back to docx due to bug #70060 [1] but that's a
different topic ;)


Extracting some conclusions from the feedback in this thread, probably
the most reasonable path having mid-term in mind would be:

1. SmartArt should be imported in an immutable way by default,
preserving the original metadata.
2. Immutable shapes can be saved to docx with no data loss, but they are
transformed to a shape group when saved to odt and this process
introduces some errors.
3. A context menu entry or custom toolbar button should present the
possibility to edit the diagram. If pressed:
   3.1 User is warned that some data loss could happen.
   3.2 Original metadata is removed at this point.
   3.3 Diagram is transformed into individual shapes.
4. Edited shapes could be saved back to a docx document but that could
imply again some data loss.

We have already implemented 1 using a bitmap that is placed instead of
the shapes (do you know some way to "lock" the edition of a shape group?
That would be really helpful). We have started to take a look at 3.3, it
implies hot-replacing our bitmaps with the actual shapes and it could
require some time. The main challenge is 4 because it implies to fix [1]
so shapes are not completely lost (because metadata is removed in 3.2).

Finally, would you agree on temporarily adding an entry to the options
dialog as described at [2] for the short term?

Thanks to you all for your help and feedback on the matter :)

[1] https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=70060
[2]
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/libreoffice-ux-advise/2013-October/002399.html

-- 
Jacobo Aragunde
Software Engineer at Igalia