Subject: Re: Patch submitted: cleanup of style menu entries
From: Dom Lachowicz (doml@appligent.com)
Date: Tue Dec 18 2001 - 14:15:42 CST
> 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 current rational sorting is called "Alphabetical Order" and I'm
quite happy with it. Related items don't necessarily have to be grouped
together. It all depends on your relationship model...
> 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!!
Triangle List style does go away with your patch, though one could
easily recreate it via the Bullets and Numbering dialog. Whether we
should keep these list styles or not is a different argument. I'd
personally like to keep them.
> 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.
Bold is not a style. Centered is not a style. These are attributes of a
style, and shouldn't be included in any default setup. If one would like
to make a centered bold style based on Normal, he/she should create it
and put it into normal.awt. Normal clean has been removed by me, and
I'll commit that change shortly. It once served a (quite important)
purpose, but doesn't any more. Normal clean reset basically all of the
attributes of a style back to their defaults. Normal does that now
(normal used to be bare-bones but I beefed it up).
But by your own argument, there should be no "Bold" style (which you
propose having) because then we'd need an italic, bold italic, block
text bold, bold underline, etc... style too. That's a *lot* of
permutations. You get a default style base - Normal. Your bold and
centered suggestions add excess styles and permuations that could be
easily recreated via the styles dialog or hitting the bold button. You
go first to "Format" and then to "Bold". Nobody would think of adding
"normal-bold" to the toolbar! Oh, wait...
Sorry,
Dom
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