I drew a mock-up for how an interface like this would work. Here it is: http://imgur.com/a/suDhH <http://imgur.com/a/suDhH>
The first tab in the sidebar in this case is used to edit the current style, while a toolbar at the bottom contains some reasonable direct formatting options like bolding , italicizing, and highlighting, as well as a few other actions that don't make sense in the sidebar, like adding in bullets and numbering. The toolbar at the top contains actions that don't change and that the user should always be able to do: creating/opening/saving documents as well as undo/redoing and looking up help. I added an "insert" tab, because that seemed to make sense as something the sidebar should be able to do. This would all take a great deal of work to implement, but it would be worth it. People have been wanting a newer, better UI from LibreOffice for a long time. An interface like this would make using styles an essential part of any users' work-flow, rather than pushing them to the side. It also takes advantage of a large amount of wasted space and reduces the usage of dialogs--which have the problem of blocking the document. Daniel -- View this message in context: http://nabble.documentfoundation.org/The-Sidebar-Problem-tp4094331p4098033.html Sent from the Design mailing list archive at Nabble.com. -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: [email protected] Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/design/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
