Subject: Re: Headers/Footers Page numbers.
From: Martin Sevior (msevior@mccubbin.ph.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Thu Mar 15 2001 - 07:42:10 CST
On Thu, 15 Mar 2001, Thomas Fletcher wrote:
> On Thu, 15 Mar 2001, Martin Sevior wrote:
>
> >
> >
> > On Thu, 15 Mar 2001, Tomas Frydrych wrote:
> >
> > > > Martin:
> > >
> > > > 2. Where and what should the header/footer dialog be?
> > > > HAve "Insert Header/footer" under "Insert". This just pops up
> > > > ...
> > > > Have "Remove Header/Footer" under "Edit"
> > > I think I would prefer both under 'Edit', as a submenu
> > > 'Headers/Footers', and then the two dialogs (or perhaps they could
> > > be merged into one?). Having two so closely related items on two
> > > different menus could be, IMO, confusing for the user.
> > >
> >
> > This was my first suggestion but Thomas Fletcher said THAT would be
> > confusing :-)
>
> Actually, what I was mainly complaining about was the fact that
> there was going to be a whole dialog devoted to headers and footers,
> and that the dialog was going to be so "simple". If you look at
> the Word dialog, it contains the ability to insert fields (ie
> the page numbers that we have in our menu right now) along with
> "other things". If all you are interested in having is a dialog
> so that you can turn the headers/footers on and off, is there a
> reason that a simple action in the menu wouldn't suffice? Not
> only that but I'd rather see that this operation become integrated
> with the actual editing of the document, such that the only need
> for would be for headers/footers to be "visible" or not and that
> if the user wants to edit the header or the footer then they would
> just click in the greyed out area of the header/footer, which would
> then "ungrey" and grey out the normal document so that they know
> that they are working in a different section. Rather than graying
> this out (or in addition to) we could also just draw a dotted line
> around the header/footer.
>
Yes. I agree with this. I see no reason why editting Header/Footers should
be not be seamless with the rest of the editting session. I found the
whole MS Word "Show Header/Footers" then edit headers footers very
confusing. It took me ages to work out how to edit a Header/Footer.
> If one doesn't exist, then there is just an empty rectangle waiting
> for the user to click to input. Then if they want to insert fields
> images or anything else, they just work normally. Why does Word
> make this so complicated ... and is there a reason why we want to?
>
OK I see your point. I've been thinking along the same lines. This is the
most natural behaviour a WYSIWYG Word Processor should exhibit. Getting
this to actually work will require that every DocSection also have both
Headers and Footers. These will have to be created on every section break
and by default with new documents. We will also have to create a View
method to create Header/Footers for old docs upon constructing a view. So
after a loadDocument() method we scan the document and if a section is
missing headers or footers we put them in. Actually we could reuse this
code for inserting Header/Footers after every section break.
This could all be done if people think it is worth the effort. Editting
Abi docs will suddenly look a lot different with the rectangular boxes on
the top and bottom of every page. Is this what we should do?
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Thu Mar 15 2001 - 07:42:51 CST