Re: commit (head): toward fixing 8130

Hi Robert,

Robert Staudinger wrote:
> Am Montag, den 17.01.2005, 12:23 +0000 schrieb Tomas Frydrych:
>
>>Hi Rob,
>>
>>
>>>I see your point. The major difference still is that the language
>>>setting
>>>- is not visible to the user (at least not obviously)
>>
>>It is visible for the current selection, because that is what gets
>>pre-selected in the dialogue.
>
>
> Yes it would definitely help (and is my plan) to preselect "Apply to
> paragraph" if there's a selection.
> What i meant is that unlike, say, font-size, the language of a paragraph
> is not "visible": you can change the language and it still looks the
> same.

Well, the current language setting at the insertion point shows in the
status bar.

>
>>It is not visible for the document default, that is a good point. The
>>easiest way to fix it is for the string next to the check box to include
>>the current setting, something like
>>
>>'make this the default language for document (currently English, US)'.
>
>
> I've been thinking about that but IMHO setting the document language is
> use case #1 with #2 setting paragraph lang far off. So when the dlg is
> opened the current doc lang is displayed anyways.
> Still other people might edit more multi-lang docs than me.

I do not follow this, but perhaps most importantly, the language
property is *not* a paragraph property, and the dialogue does not apply
the choice to paragraphs; it applies it to selection. If there is no
selection, the language gets applied to the insertion point. If there is
a selection, it gets applied to the selection (which might contain a
single word, or three paragraphs, or the whole document); at that point
each element in the selection receives the property lang:xx-XX.

The 'default document language' is quite different from that. The
document default language gets inherited by an element that has not got
the lang property set, and none of who's parents has that property set.
'Apply to Paragraph' is not the opposite to 'set as document default'.
Quite apart from that, you need to be able to apply the language to
individual words, not just parapgraphs.

> Rethinking the whole discussion there might be a completely different
> way to solve the problem.
> - Document language is a global property and should therefore be in
> "File -> Set Language"

Yes, but that would mean a new and otherwise identical dialogue to
achieve something for which the current checkbox is more than adequate.
I am not sure that having the language dlg pop up at two places is very
user friendly, because it requires the user to remember where to look
for the Language dialogue for the different tasks. This way you always
go to Tools->Set Language.

> - Lang as a paragraph property could go in a seperate notebook in
> "Format -> Paragraph".

As I explained above, language is not a paragraph property and so it
should not go into the paragraph dialogue. Language is property of
characters. It is intentionally on the tools menu, because strictly
speaking it is not a format as bold, or italics.

> The question here is how the paragraph-dlg
> handles multiple
> selected paragraphs. It would of course be nice to select x paragraphs
> and apply a
> common language then.

You can do that very easily as things are: select x paragraphs and go to
Tools->Set Language. The language gets applied to the whole selection.

> I'm also somewhat inclined to see "Format -> Set Language" working but
> i think
> it's not such a sommon function to expose it there.
> The more i think about that the more i like it, it'd be conceptionally
> clean IMO.

I do not consider this conceputaly clean. It complicates the interface
and it confuses language with character formating.

best regards,

Tomas

>
> Thanks,
> - Rob
>
>
>
Received on Mon Jan 17 16:10:21 2005