Re: [tdf-discuss] LibreOffice UI should be tweaked, not reinvented

Le 2010-11-04 04:34, Sebastian Spaeth a écrit :
> On Wed, 3 Nov 2010 20:55:19 +0100, Johannes Bausch wrote:
> > things concerning tables. We absolutely HAVE to make the user use the
> > stylesheet stuff, and it must be so easy that they start to use it on
> > one-paged documents.
> Removing the font chooser, and font-size selector would save lots of
> space that could be replaced with a simple style chooser :)
We should not go overboard. While we should _encourage_ people to use 
styles when they are best used, we should not _force_ them to do so. We 
will loose the followers we have and not gain any new ones if we impose 
"the right way".

Besides, there are times when styles are useful and styles should be 
used much more than they are by most people. But there are many 
situations where styles add an unncessary level of complexity and a few 
times when styles are NOT warranted. For instance:
- Take this text and assume I want to emphasize one word. I could simply 
do Ctl-I and get the text in Italics or define a character style and 
apply it. The character style may be warranted, but it's a multi-step 
process, and quite frankly, if I decide further down the road to change 
the entire text from Cambria to Bodoni, the text in Italics will change 
accordingly and the text defined with a character style may not change 
appropriately (it may stay in Cambria Italics). On the other hand, if 
character styles work properly, I may define a "book name" style as it 
would allow me to change all those from one font to another in a jiffy.
- In Desktop publishing, there are times when fragments of text are out 
of context (ad, poster...). I find it easier not to have a base style 
for these because neither paragraph nor font information is linked to 
the rest of the text.

Finally, if we need to train people to the proper use of word-processing 
software, I would suggest that emphasis be given, in order to the 
following "nasty" habits:
– proper use of spaces and punctuation (hyphen vs n-dash vs m-dash);
– proper use of indents and tabulations (many people still use spaces or 
default tabs in succession);
– proper use of "space before paragraph" and paragraph-chaining options 
such as "keep with next paragraph", rather than paragraph returns in series.
All these make document modification harder than it needs to be. A 
couple of short videos might even help educate people very quickly. 
Speaking of modifications, it is much easier to work with a document 
that uses the above techniques even if it has no style, than it is to 
work with an improperly formatted document that has styles.

--
Michel Gagnon
Montréal (Québec, Canada) -- http://mgagnon.net

--
Unsubscribe instructions: Email to discuss+help@documentfoundation.org
Posting guidelines: http://netmeister.org/news/learn2quote.html
Archive: http://www.documentfoundation.org/lists/discuss/
*** All posts to this list are publicly archived ***