[Libreoffice] [GSOC] Multiline inputbar

[Noel Power]

On 27/06/11 09:24, Anurag Jain wrote:
> Hello Noel,
>
> Here I got some chance to play with MS Excel 2010 and I analyzed the
> behavior of inputbar. I'm sending an image here showing the desire
> behavior.
>
> The first figure in the image shows the normal behavior showing only a
> single line and keep on wrapping the content text on overflows.This is
> what has already been done in single line mode.
>
> 2: Second thing is to enable the button press. On button press as you
> can see, only two lines are shown and scrollbar shifts its position
> below the button (that is probably to make the UI consistent adjusting
> the button and scrollbar in double the height of the line. This
> actually does  not affect the text output area, just makes things
> consistent).Scrollbar works same way scrolling single line at a
> time.This can be said as multiline mode.
>
> 3: The third thing is to make the inputbar re-sizable on the mouse
> drag. On hovering the down edge of the inputbar here the cursor
> changes and can be dragged to show the hidden contents (this also
> happens in units of single line height. Also here the scrollbar's
> thumb size changes depending on the height of the inputbar.)
>
> So if this is implemented in similar way it can be good UI enhancement
> to LO. As of now I'm trying to set the position of the scrollbar and
> button, making them appear at the right place i.e. after the inputbar.
> Also as of now I do not have any idea about the implementing the
> resizing of inputbar. As I've already sent the patch for fixing the
> width, height and border of the InputBarGroup and after i get the
> positions correctly we can start working on these improvements.

so I would not get overly hung up by this, we don't have to have exactly 
the same arrangement, I think a workable and useful first cut is as 
Kohei and I mentioned already

1st pass

- single line mode ( you have this already ) but you need to add a new 
button for switching the mode ( don't even worry about a scrollbar )
- multi-line mode, same as above but give a 'bigger' input area, maybe 
5+ lines ( for the first pass I wouldn't even care about a scrollbar too 
much, just get it switching nicely, button placed properly etc.

2nd pass

- single line mode as above
- multi-line mode as above but with the scrollbar placed underneath the 
button

after you get the above working then you could try and make it a bit 
sexier with adding the scrollbar in single line mode and some of the 
other behaviour

thanks

Noel