Subject: Re: Patch submitted: cleanup of style menu entries
From: Bryce Nesbitt (bryce@obviously.com)
Date: Tue Dec 18 2001 - 13:54:00 CST
Dom Lachowicz wrote:
>
> 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/
There are three "points" to the patch. The first, and most important, is to
have rational sorting. "Triange List" "Star List" and "Bullet List" are related, scattering
them among the menu is not good.
The second point of the patch is that there are excess styles. It's not like
"Triangle list" actually goes away. You'll get one default list style. If you want
another you select it. The non-style UI does not have a
seperate entry for each possible combination! You go first to "list", then to "triangle list".
Nobody would consider adding "triangle list" to the toolbar!!
The third point is that some very basic styles are missing. "Bold" for example.
And I can't quite figure out what "Normal Clean" is intended for, even after looking
at the source code.
Some cleanup here seems necessary. What can we agree on?
-Bryce
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