Re: Normal Mode and WYSIWYG printing.

Hi Martin,

Martin Sevior wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> I want to raise an issue.
>
> During the 2.5 cycle cycle the "normal mode" has been altered to fit the
> most possible text on the screen. This includes things like ignoring
> right margins, altering text indents and reducing the line spacing for
> documents line spacings set at 1.5 or 2.0 time minimum.
>
> This means that the document on screen can look considerably different
> from how it is printed. It is easy to get even the number of pages shown
> in normal mode to be different to what is actually printed.
>
> So the question is, do we live with this and tell our users that normal
> mode or embedded mode will not actually show you what your document will
> look like on paper?
>

The Normal mode is not WYSIWYG and is not meant to be WYSIWYG; in Word,
from where I think the founding fathers borrowed the idea for the menu
entry, it is a mode in which the use of screen real estate is maximised
by eliminating margins, headers/footers, footnotes, and object
positioning details.

In spite of the menu entry nothing resembling the Normal mode has ever
been properly implemented in AbiWord in spite of users asking for it. I
personally have always used the Normal mode in Word far more than the
Print Layout mode because it is far easier to work in if you are
primarily entering text: you get bigger fonts for the same size of
window, your lines always start at horizontal scroll position 0 if your
page width does not fit the window size, and in Word is it far more
responsive than the print-layout mode. On the down side, there are
things that cannot be done while in Normal mode (like inserting textboxes).

The place where the lack of a non-print-layout mode hurts most is on
embedded devices; on a 19" monitor I can live 3" of unused space in the
page margins all around; I am just about getting decent font size for a
fullscreen AbiWord and page-width zoom. On 2" embedded screen I cannot
afford that space; to fit an entire line on the screen, I have to zoom
down to a level which makes the text unreadable.

I do not think that the Normal mode being non-WYSIWYG confuses anyone,
that is what at least people familiar with Word expect. But if there is
general agreement that all AbiWord views should be WYSIWYG, then I
suggest that we remove the Normal mode menu entry rather than revert
back to the old behaviour.

Tomas

P.S. I have a patch sitting here to back port the Normal mode changes to
stable. It is needed to build a usable AbiWord package for the 770 but I
will sit on it a bit longer.
Received on Wed Dec 13 09:37:39 2006