[Libreoffice] Suggestions for improving the look 'n' feel of LibreOffice

[Michael Meeks]

Hi Alex,

On Fri, 2011-10-28 at 18:57 +0200, Alexander.wilms at zoho.com wrote:
> My name is Alex and I am a member of the design team. I've collected
> several ideas regarding the look of LO. I'd like to hear your
> opinions:

	Great ! :-) the best list for this is
libreoffice-ux-advise at lists.freedesktop.org I've CC'd that - hopefully
we can take follow-ups to there.

> 2) Currently, only "Shift" allows scaling a picture while keeping the
> ratio. Apparently thats how Word works, too, but if one is used to
> Gimp or Inkscape one intuitively tries "Ctrl". I suggest to allow both
> keys.

	IMHO the ability to scale an -image- destroying it's aspect ratio -
which we have by default on re-sizing them is a mis-feature. IMHO we
should invert the sense here - dragging the corner handles should by
default preserve aspect ratio (perhaps just for images). Clearly other
handles are already provided and near at hand for sizing in just one
direction, and we should flip the sense of ctrl&&||shift to allow
aspect-busting sizing. But of course consensus on that appreciated - so
we can knock up an easy hack.

	Sadly, looking over the shoulder of my wife, plus daughters I've had to
undo / fix-this up for them several times, and no doubt lots of people
screw up their documents accidentally like this. [ Still, with 4x3 TV
frequently stretched to 16x9, perhaps people are hardened these days to
seeing footballers as fatter and shorter than they really are ;-]

> 5) The handles for resizing and rotating look rather dated. They
> should be replaced by some squares/circles filled with a nice
> gradient. Are they hardcoded or could the graphics simply be replaced?

	Agreed - there are two modes: large and small for the handles but both
look dated as you say. Some consensus on this from the design team might
let us create some easy hack around this.

	Lets build that on ux-advise. It'd be great to have someone to track
discussion on the topics and come up with a consensus there.

	HTH,

		Michael.

-- 
michael.meeks at suse.com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot