Subject: Re: Where should Headers/footers dialog be?
From: Thomas Fletcher (thomasf@qnx.com)
Date: Mon Mar 12 2001 - 08:02:58 CST
On Mon, 12 Mar 2001, Martin Sevior wrote:
> HI everyone,
> I hope to finish the headers/footers back end by the end of
> the week. If so I'll implement a little dialog to manipulate them like
> this:
>
> -----------------------------------
> Insert Header X | Insert Footer X
> Delete Header X | Delete Footer X
> Edit Header X | Edit Footer X
> -----------------------------------
> Apply X Cancel X
> -----------------------------------
>
> Where X's are checkboxes appropriately enabled/disabled given the current
> status of header/footers at the insertion point.
>
> Now MSWord labels this dialog "Show Header/Footer" and puts it under the
> "View" menu list which I always found extremely confusing.
>
> Abi has an greyed-out entry for "Show Header/Footer" also under View. Now
> given that you can just click in a Header/Footer to edit it in Abi (unlike
> MS Word) I think we should label this dialog "Edit Header/Footer" and
> place it under the "Edit" menu list.
>
> Opinions?
I'll tell you that right away, this sounds like a confusing dialog.
I just took a gander at the Word 98 one, and while I can't say that
it excites me, it is pretty simple. Once you have the header/footer
dialog up it puts a dashed region around the header/footer (ala
show paragraphs for the main document) and then allows you to toggle
between editing the header and the footer. Is there a technical reason
why we can't just make editing the header/footer a more standard
operation (ie If you click in the header/footer area then you can
edit in that area, otherwise you are editing the normal text) rather
than mess around with these dialogs? Then the "Hide/Show Headers/Footers"
would be just that. It would hide or show the header or the footers.
Just curious.
Thomas
-------------------------------------------------------------
Thomas (toe-mah) Fletcher QNX Software Systems
thomasf@qnx.com Neutrino Development Group
(613)-591-0931 http://www.qnx.com/~thomasf
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Mon Mar 12 2001 - 08:11:52 CST