Subject: Re: Patch submitted: cleanup of style menu entries
From: Dom Lachowicz (doml@appligent.com)
Date: Tue Dec 18 2001 - 11:46:11 CST
On Tue, 2001-12-18 at 10:11, Bryce Nesbitt wrote:
> The AbiWord style menu has been getting a bit cluttered & confusing recently. The main
> culprit is the naming: related items are scattered through the menu.
>
> I also feel there are also too many entries. There is no need (and indeed no way) to mirror
> every AbiWord feature as a style. There's no need for twelve types of lists, for example.
> The defualt styles should be like the toolbar -- presenting the most common
> options, and giving a template for a person to build their own specific set.
>
> This patch cleans up the menu, and sorts related items. The flow and inheritence of
> the styles has been regularized. If applied in this form, this path will require matching
> changes on the part of the translators.
Hi Bryce,
I am in favor of removing some of these styles from our system (not
going to say which) but I think that the majority of these should stay
and I'm going to reject this patch. Notably, your patch would also break
other useful bits of our system like endnotes.
The thing is that MSWord has all of these styles defined internally
(more or less) - what they do is a trick to hide some styles from
particular bits of the UI. So what I *would* be in favor of is some sort
of smart display of styles in different bits of the UI. The styles
dialog, for instance, might always show all defined styles. The toolbar
combo might just show the most-famous builtin styles and user-defined
ones. The point here is that how smart this scheme gets is up to you.
Maybe add a 'shown in toolbar' flag to the style class, and then do some
smartness with populating the toolbar controls based on that
information. Ideally this would all be XP and not too difficult. Then
I'd check in your work and we'd haggle about which styles to include in
the toolbar combo and which to exclude :)
Dom
/tempted to do this himself but showing some restraint at the moment/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Tue Dec 18 2001 - 11:45:07 CST