Re: User Interface of Dialogs

On Jan 16, 2008 1:30 PM, Vinicius Depizzol <vdepizzol@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> I've been using Abiword these days, and, while the paragraph dialog
> looks very similar to the MS Word version, it seems a bit strange to
> me. The same happened with Font and "Bullets and Numbering" dialogs.
>
> So I drawed a suggestion in Glade with the interface I think it would
> be useful and integrate well with the Human Interface Guidelines from
> GNOME.
>
> What do you think?

Indeed the paragraph dialog has not gotten any attention for quite
some time. One of the reasons is that it has not yet been ported to
use libglade (early abiword relied on generated code IIRC). Are you
interested to work on that? If so we would be very happy to get you
started.

Regarding the actual design of the dialog, I think it may be worth
trying to use the same visual metaphors the toolbar uses, where
possible.
E.g. "Alignment" uses 4 buttons on the toolbar
(left/center/right/justify), so the dialog should use the same,
instead of the combo box. This helps users to immediately recognise
what's going on. Look at "Paragraph" in the following mockup:
http://abisource.com/~robsta/tmp/abiword-styles-04.png

Also the preview may be not needed. For paragraphs auto-apply should
be feasible in terms of performance.

Best,
Rob
Received on Wed Jan 16 15:22:35 2008