Subject: Re: Headers/Footers Page numbers.
From: Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Date: Fri Mar 23 2001 - 18:46:41 CST
At 01:33 AM 3/21/01 +1100, Martin Sevior wrote:
>On Sun, 18 Mar 2001, Paul Rohr wrote:
>> At 04:33 PM 3/18/01 +1100, Martin Sevior wrote:
>> >I get it Paul. I agree 95% with you. The 5% of disagreement is that if
>> >either the boxes are visible or a header is already present *single*
>> >clicking in the header will activate it. You still have to double click in
>> >order to create a header.
>> >
>> >I did not know about the double clicking in Word to activate the header
>> >after using the program for 3 years. Consequently dealing with headers was
>> >a MAJOR frustration in Word for me.
I missed a nuance here earlier -- you *didn't* know to double-click to
activate an existing header, but *did* know to double-click to add one?
That's not what I would have expected.
>> Wouldn't it be more consistent and easier to explain if we used the same
>> number of clicks in both cases?
>>
>> I've expected that double-click was well-known by now, and thus less
>> annoying than single-click, but that was only a guess. It's not like we
>> have hard data from a usability lab or anything. :-)
>>
>> In any event, it's probably less confusing to have them both be
>> single-clicks than have one of each.
>
>Hmmmm it's a tough call. I know what behaviour I'd prefer. I'd MUCH rather
>single click to go into a pre-existing header/footer and double click to
>insert one. To me they are different things. Maybe to a Church secretary
>they're not.
Have you gotten any usability feedback from anyone else on this? If not, by
all means go ahead and implement it your way so we can all see how it feels.
We'll know it was the right call if nobody else cares enough to log it in
Bugzilla. ;-)
>OK. How about two entries on the Edit Menu? "Edit Header" and "Edit
>Footer". Selecting these puts the cursor in either the header or the
>footer and of course draws a box around them. I think this is simple and
>obvious. I was confused by the "Show Header/footer" command in Word since
>boxes appeared at the top and offscreen where I couldn't see it in the
>footer. I wanted to edit the footer but I thought Word was just giving me
>the header.
>
>This way what happens is unambiguous.
Yeah. Without a toolbar entry to switch to the other one, people may not
realize they can scroll to get there. As soon as they get the whole page
view concept, they'll think to look down there, but in the mean time...
>> >Later I will add icons to
>> >insert "Page Numbers", Number of Pages, Most recent "Section or Chapter",
>> >Most recent "sub-section" fields.
>> >
>> >Section and sub-section fields will be implemented after I do numbered
>> >headings which will happen after this header/footer stuff is done. It's
>> >all straight forward code. It just to get written.
>>
>> Could these all be items on a task-specific popup toolbar instead of a
>> full-fledged modeless dialog? Our XP support for toolbars is much better
>> than our XP support for dialogs. ;-)
>
>I can't let this slip by. Toolbars != Dialogs. Where did I see that before
>just over a year ago? :-)
ROTFL. :-)
In this case, we only need a few operations, so a toolbar feels appropriate.
That glorious symbol dialog is much bigger and more dialog-sized.
>Word does this though and it makes sense since
>you want to minimize the amount of text covered by the dialog.
>
>Actually I'll leave this for post 1.0. I think simple Edit Header / Edit
>Footer in the menus will be sufficient for 1.0.
Gotcha. Makes sense.
Paul
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