[Libreoffice] [PATCH] [UX] Rename "Default Formatting" --> "Clear Direct Formatting"

[Christoph Noack]

Hi Octavio!

First, thanks for the in-depth analysis and the patches, but I am not
that convinced that this will work as expected - at least the naming is
consistent behavior across the suite.

My rationale ...

"Default Formatting" does not only reset the direct / hard formatting,
but also applied character styles. That also makes "Clear Direct
Formatting" a bit inaccurate.

The terminology "Default" is used throughout the office suite. For
example, the buttons "Default" resets all manual changes of an derived
style (Stylist). And "direct" might also be unknown to those users who
are unsure what "default formatting" is.

The string length will make the menu wider, which gets an issue when the
English text gets translated into foreign languages. Especially since we
do have many sub-menus within this menu. Same applies to "Clear All
Formatting" you are planning to change.


By the way, it would be great to know some more information where this
request came from (especially since you've invested quite a lot of
work). Maybe I can help somehow ... at the moment (and this is quite
bad) I don't have a better proposal. Sorry :-\

Cheers,
Christoph

Am Freitag, den 21.01.2011, 15:09 -0800 schrieb Octavio Alvarez:
> Hi.
> 
> The purpose of the following set of patches is to rename "Default
> Formatting" to "Clear Default Formatting" across all the suite. The goal
> is to clarify what this function currently does and should do. The current
> situation is that everybody has its own interpretation of this, mainly
> because "Default Style" and "Default Format" are different things and
> neither of them mean "clear direct formatting". This mess doesn't help us
> have a common ground for decision taking. Even the specification[1] behind
> it is ambiguous.
> 
> After a bit of analysis, I found that formatting applied over styles is
> uniformly called "direct" throughout the help but some code still talk
> about "hard" format.
> 
> This should allow us to have a common ground for this. Should another
> resetting-specific need arise, then it will clearly be an enhancement
> request. Should a function do anything different than just "clear direct
> formatting" it will clearly be bug.
> 
> I hope the user to benefit too, as the new name better answers the
> question "what does this do": it clears direct formatting.
> 
> The patches rename all existing instances of "Default Formatting" to
> "Clear Direct Formatting", including menus and help texts. Search was done
> using ./g grep and replacement was made by hand. Some instances were not
> changed. For example, there was uno:ResetAttrs and uno:SetDefault, which
> obviously refer to different things. uno:SetDefault was left alone.
> 
> The set of patches apply to different repositories.
> 
> In the upcoming days I will include another set of patches to rename
> "Clear formatting", which removes direct and sets default style, to "Clear
> all formatting" (I'm not so convinced about the phrasing, but that was the
> best+shortest text I could come up with). This should clarify it even
> more. I request for comments.
> 
> There are still other instances of "Default Formatting" that should be
> renamed to "Apply Default Style", but I can't find it as a user, so I'll
> wait for this.
> 
> [1]
> http://specs.openoffice.org/writer/formatting/Assigning_Styles_in_Writer.sxw
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