[Libreoffice-ux-advise] [Bug 90068] FORMATTING Proposal to make italic, bold and other font variants as built-in styles, in addition to emphasis and strong emphasis, which are not obvious to inexperienced people and have different actions, particularly in export targets like LaTeX.

[bugzilla-daemon at bugs.documentfoundation.org]

https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=90068

Heiko Tietze <tietze.heiko at gmail.com> changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
           Keywords|needsUXEval                 |
             Status|UNCONFIRMED                 |RESOLVED
                 CC|libreoffice-ux-advise at lists |tietze.heiko at gmail.com
                   |.freedesktop.org            |
         Resolution|---                         |WONTFIX

--- Comment #13 from Heiko Tietze <tietze.heiko at gmail.com> ---
Many thanks for your thorough elaboration. We definitely need the expert
knowledge from professional writers, although most of us have an academic
background too.

There is no doubt that Latex is a great tool and serves really well the use
case of academic writing. Another example for a specific use case is Scribus,
also a great tool when it comes to DTP. Both are not really easy to use for
beginners because of the restricted workflow and the advanced functionality.
LibreOffice (like any other office tool) fills the gap and allows, for
instance, writing a letter with zero knowledge on layouting. It also aims to be
an alternative to Latex and Scribus but not to the full extend. We identified
two primary personas (prototypical users), Benjamin and Eve
(https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Design/HIG_foundations#Persona). And when
we talk about improvements to the workflow or UX in general, we have to take
both into consideration. While Eve might find into a Latex-like workflow,
Benjamin wouldn't do that. 

Another aspect of Libreoffice is the tight relation to the open document
format. It's always paramount to follow standards since we want to free people
from a specific program. You should be able to create documents with
LibreOffice and load it later in another tool but with exactly the same layout.

While you say "users should not be presented with more than one way of calling
text elements and modifications..." we explicitly want to allow different ways
to accomplish a task. You can define a character style "textit" with an italic
font style or "textbf" with bold weight and work like in Latex. The difference
is that all parties have to agree on the styles and have to carefully make use
of it.

What we can do is to create a good set of factory defaults. That begins with
Emphasis and Strong Emphasis for the character style over a reasonable default
paragraph style based on norms, up to complete templates (where we have a lot
of room to improve). And we can educate the user, which means among other
aspects to give a clear feedback of the underlying formatting. Some ideas about
such a "style inspector" are discussed in bug 112852 and bug 90646.

Again, many thanks for your ideas and comments. Keep on with that!

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