Re: Styles management dialog

On Son, 2005-02-13 at 21:11 +0100, Reinout van Schouwen wrote:
>Hello Rob,
>
>On Sun, 13 Feb 2005 18:35:32 +0100, Robert Staudinger
><robsta@stereolyzer.net> wrote:
>
>> i uploaded mockups for the styles dialog we talked about. It's really
>> a hard one to get right and therefore fun to work on ;-)
>
>I'll do my best to give you a little more work to do! =)
>
>> It would be really nice IMO if we could reuse the existing dialogs and
>> embed them, like i did in the mockups.
>
>I'm not sure I agree. In your current design you have embedded tabbed
>notebooks. This actually breaks the tab metaphor where you always have
>tabs on the outside of a page. At least if you want to embed the
>notebooks, place the embedded area at the top border of the window.

The mockups are not 100% HIG compliant, i know. Having the tabs on top
would contradict the "top to bottom" methaphor (first select style, then
edit).

A possibility getting rid of the tabs would be to use a tree on the left
side for selecting the property dialog. I'm however not completely
convinced about that one ...

> You will also have to make sure the complete dialog is as wide as the
> widest embedded dialog, you don't want to have to resize the window to
> be able to use it.

That will of course be handeled by gtk itself.

>> This is a very quick shot, please let me hear what you think.
>
>The 'List' plus radio button group can be improved. First, you make it
>to read like a sentence ("List All Styles"). This is a very big
>problem for translators; in many languages verb and object are in
>different order!

No problem.

>Furthermore I have my doubts about the radio buttons
>controlling the visibility of the styles, the HIG[1] says that
>"Clicking a radio button should not affect the values of any other
>controls."

True, but maybe not a problem in this case. We could make sure that the
currently selected style always stays the same when changing the list
option. So no user visible widget would change.

>Rather, I would employ a filter model where all styles are listed by
>default, and you could filter the styles based on criteria like
>'used', 'user-defined' or perhaps additional (user defined) ones. For
>documents with lots of styles perhaps an autocomplete widget would be
>nice.

I don't understand. You still need a widget so select the criteria - no?

>Lastly, the styles window is a utility window, not a dialog initiating
>some action. Cancel/OK is therefore not appropriate, simply one Close
>button would be better. (Perhaps a 'Revert' button would be in order
>to make it possible to back out of any inadvertently made changes.)

Well, after you change a style it is of course applied in the document.
If the document is very large this will take longer than recommended for
auto apply.

- Rob
Received on Sun Feb 13 21:46:41 2005