[Libreoffice-ux-advise] [Bug 81475] Meta: enhancing Writer's standard and formatting toolbars

[bugzilla-daemon at freedesktop.org]

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=81475

--- Comment #4 from Jay Philips <philipz85 at hotmail.com> ---
Created attachment 103482
  --> https://bugs.freedesktop.org/attachment.cgi?id=103482&action=edit
Google Docs - single widget color picker

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Step 4 - Suggestion of new UI elements
-------------------------------------

The creation of new UI elements is not an easy task to my knowledge, as it can
involve quite a bit of development work in order to complete, and due to that,
i've limited my suggestions to just one.

Single Color Group Button - Presently in Writer, there are 3 drop down buttons
for colors (i.e. Font Color, Highlight Color, and Background Color) and they
take up more space then any other group of buttons or drop down list in the
formatting toolbar. It would be beneficial to have a single drop down color
pick widget that has tabs for Text, Highlight and Background, similar to how
google docs does it in the attachment. Of course the drawback to this
suggestion is that it wouldnt be as easy to add an already selected color to
text, because its a merged single button that you couldnt click the icon
portion of it to do one thing and the down arrow portion to perform another.

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Step 5 - Additional Suggestions
-------------------------------------

During this process, i've thought about alot of other suggestions that didn't
make it into the final mockup, so i'm taking this opportunity to present them
encase others think they are worth using.

Removal of Cut/Copy/Paste Buttons - With over 90% of users using either the
shortcut key or context menu to achieve this functionality, there really isnt a
need to keep around these buttons other than to maintain the standard toolbar
legacy layout used in most applications. The removal of the paste button would
only be a recommendation if 'paste special' was added to the context menu [bug
62947]. Removing these would allow the inclusion of 3 other buttons that dont
have easy access to from the toolbar, like 'Manual Break' (.uno:InsertBreak)
and 'Insert Columns' (.uno:FormatColumns), which are accessed ~99% from the
menu.

Cut/Copy Group Button - As these two buttons are mutually exclusive in their
actions, they could be combined as a group with copy as its main button, as
copy is used 3 times more often than cut. Combining these could allow the
addition of one other button into the toolbar.

Print Group Button - By converting the standard print button into a print group
button, the drop down would list all the available printers for easy direct
printing to and the list would end with a more button which would give access
to the print dialog.

Customized Open Drop Down - When most users are in a particular application,
they consider that application as an independant application (thats how
libreoffice even presents it in the application menu) and as such, if they have
Writer opened and clicked on the toolbar open drop down list, they would expect
to see only text documents in the list.

Customized Open dialog - Similar to customization of the open drop down list,
it would be equally expected that if a user clicked on the toolbar open button,
that 'Text documents' would be automatically selected in the file types drop
down list. It makes no sense that 'All Files' is selected by default, when
LibreOffice cant open all files.

Improvements to Tooltips - With many of the buttons that have been suggested to
be included in the mockup, their tooltips are not suitably written because they
link to the wordings in the menu (e.g. 'From File' used for the insert image
button [bug 80542]), were incorrectly written (e.g. 'Insert Footnote/Endnote
Directly' when this button only inserts footnotes), or can be further improved
by better wording (e.g. 'Hyperlink' to 'Add/Edit Hyperlink').

Highlighting and Background Color Confusion - I find that having both these
buttons in the formatting toolbar to be a major confusion because a user is
supposed to understand that highlighting is the text background color and
background is the paragraph background color. IMHO, i'd assuming most users
would consider highlighting to be what they perseive as background color and as
such, the background color button should be removed. What really makes things
more confusing is that the Character and Paragraph dialogs both have tabs
called 'Background'.

Insert Table Button Default Behaviour - As most users will normally create
small tables, the default behaviour of the insert table button
(.uno:InsertTable) should be to open its drop down and not to show the dialog
box.

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