At 07:58 AM 3/15/01 -0600, Sam TH wrote:
>I don't think this is what Thomas was suggesting. At least I hope
>not. What I got out of Thomas's mail was this:
>
>There are two states for headers and footers: on and off. This is
>controlled by a simple menu item. When headers/footers are off, you
>see nothing different than you would see in an Abi document without
>h/f. When you turn headers/footers on, you see one of two things:
>
> If there is a header/footer in that space, you see it.
>
> If there is no header/footer in that space, you see a gray
> shaded rectangle where it would be.
>
>Clicking on either the h/f or the rectance moves you into h/f editing
>mode, possibly graying the rest of the document.
>
>Note that Insert Page Numbers should not turn h/f mode on. The page
>numbers should simply be invisible, until you turn on h/f mode.[1]
>
>At least, that's how I think it should work. I think that would be
>*significatly* more in line with what users want to Just Work.
>
>[1] Potentially, we could have a preference to turn h/f mode on by
>default.
This sounds very nice. I especially like the notion that h/f content gets
added or removed, as needed, by toggling the h/f editing mode on and typing
there as usual.
One question, though.
Is the intent that page layout mode *not* show h/f content unless this mode
is set? If so, that might be a potential source of confusion, since that
content will be printing regardless, no?
Would it be even simpler if we *always* display the h/f for page layout
views, but subtly change how we display either the document content or the
h/f depending on which is currently editable? Then the menu toggle would
switch between those two editing modes.
Thus, the user experience would be that all content is always visible, but
only a single container type is editable at one time. To visually
distinguish which content is editable, we could either:
- gray the one that isn't, or
- do Word's dashed-line trick around the h/f when they're editable
Theoretically, either could work, but we'd probably have to do some
usability tests to see which is less confusing.
Paul
