[Libreoffice-ux-advise] [Bug 155494] Cursor goes beyond margins when typing spaces at the end of a line

[bugzilla-daemon at bugs.documentfoundation.org]

https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=155494

--- Comment #22 from William Friedman <will.friedman at gmail.com> ---
I very much appreciate Attila's detailed analysis and especially his concern
with breaking older docs. I certainly agree that existing users should not be
penalized for having made docs that worked with existing quirks/bugs. At the
same time, that's a recipe for stagnation. Compatibility flags/options may be
the only way to balance stability/backwards compatibility with innovation and
progress.

As for the concern that "If we "offer a compatibility option to retain them,
but *not* display them" then  we resurrect the original bug reports, as we wont
be able to see it" -- couldn't they only be made visible with "Formatting
Marks" enabled? BTW, with the current implementation, even with "Formatting
Marks" enabled, you can no longer see extra spaces (in the form of
vertically-centered blue dots) beyond the right hand *page* (not margin)
boundary, even though the cursor goes into the gray area beyond the page
boundary. More than that -- you can't click the cursor onto spaces that go into
the gray area. Clicking on the gray area on a line that has spaces going into
the gray area beyond the page boundary puts the cursor at the boundary of the
page; you can then press the right arrow or end to get to the end of the
spaces. And, as Attila points out, "And at MS the selection is displayed even
over the margin.. at LO you can select those spaces, it just dont display the
selection." This is yet another problem with the current implementation.
Selection should show exactly which characters have been selected so that the
user will know what is being affected with the next edit.

Upon reflection, it seems that there are really two issues here, which are
separable but intimately connected:

1) One is the layout issue -- how are trailing/leading spaces actually treated:
do they wrap to the next line, do they extend infinitely, or are they
disallowed/truncated? The second is the cursor movement issue, which only shows
up if trailing spaces are allowed to extend infinitely. In terms of the layout
issue, extending infinitely seems to me the absolute worst possible choice of
the three (so of course MS Word went with that option! :-) ), and I think it is
deserving of serious reevaluation. 

2) The second is the cursor movement issue, which of course only appears if
trailing spaces are allowed to extend infinitely. The guiding principles, to my
mind, should be: 

A) the cursor should never disappear, as it now does if you right justify a
line and type LTR spaces past the left margin -- try it with Formatting Marks
on, the spaces suddenly shift to the right and disappear off the right end of
the page!

B) you should always be able to click to place the cursor in existing text. You
can't right now, because if spaces extend into the gray area beyond a page
border, you can't click there. This also addresses Attila's concern that "we
may could revert the cursor movement fix, and leave only the extra space
display... you wont be able to move cursor into wrong places... but cursor
movement will be confusing.. even more as it was long before... because now you
would see the spaces, but you wont be able to click into it" -- you already
can't fully click into it in the current implementation!

C) if selecting text, *all* of the text to be affected should be highlighted
(currently not the case, because spaces beyond the page *margin* are not
highlighted).

In the immediate term, I would vote to revert the new cursor implementation,
which in my experience causes more problems than it solves. In the longer term
(which I hesitate to say, since in LO terms that has meant and could mean
decades!), I think a full re-evaluation of how trailing/leading spaces are
handled is in order.

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