[Libreoffice-ux-advise] [Bug 104318] CTL formatting applies even when CTL checkbox is unchecked

[bugzilla-daemon at bugs.documentfoundation.org]

https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=104318

--- Comment #5 from Mike Kaganski <mikekaganski at hotmail.com> ---
Let me try to explain what you see.

To make LibreOffice UI less cluttered for users that don't need some of the
functionality (like people using exclusively Western writing systems, e.g.
English language), LibreOffice has some options to hide some of its controls. I
stress this word: *hide*. It doesn't mean that hiding something from the sight
of user makes settings controlled by those controls to magically start behaving
differently. It is judged that an average English speaker would not care what
font is defined for CTL (complex text layout) or CJK
(Chineese/Japaneese/Korean) languages - simply because that average speaker
would *not* input the data in those languages.

SO when you create new styles, or use any pre-existing styles, when your UI is
setup to hide those controls, what happens is LibreOffice keeps
creating/remembering the default settings for those languages (it creates them
as hard-coded in program, to make sensible default fonts that allow to use
those styles with those writing systems). But those settings are, naturally,
hidden. So user may be unaware of their presens and effect.

When a user who has a CTL/CJK keyboard layout/IME, but has CTL/CJK "support"
(=controls display) disabled, starts to type in those writing system languages,
LibreOffice still detects the language (say, Bengali) - remember, that we only
hide controls, don't change any behaviour! - and starts applying the (currently
hidden) parts of the style, e.g., the CTL font, regardless of what font was
assigned to Western systems (the only visible control when CTL and CJK are
hidden), even if user assigned a CTL-capable font to Western config.

This is not a bug. This works as designed (although one might propose some
improvements here). Personally I feel that those controls would better be
removed totally, so that all controls (including CTL/CJK) were shown at all
times; possibly with better separation to tabs, so that user would have better
distinction ("that tab is for CTL - no need to look there for English text").
But my opinion aside: it's usual complaint that "no average user would figure
that"; but let's rwad that again: the use case is that LibreOffice first launch
on a CTL/CJK system should automatically enable those settings - thus for
average (was majority of) CTL/CJK user, this is not a problem; for a typical
Western systems user, those controls are overkill and clutter, so they are
hidden by default - and do the good job *by default*; and the minority who
happen to use Werstern locale systems, but manually configure CTL/CJK input
methods later, need some configuration, that is described in (surprise!) our
documentation [1] (oh, I know: "users don't read documentation!"). Or searching
for "Bengali" on Ask site [2] brings relevant answers right away. So -
undoubtedly, there might be some improvement to this; but (a) what you see are
not bugs at all; and (b) the proposals to improve must be specific, like "let's
do this like that", not something like "It's not apparent to me (without
reading docs) - so go change somehow!".

[1] https://documentation.libreoffice.org
[2] ask.libreoffice.org

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