In this week's design meeting, bug 158253 came up:
Shapes-via-Gallery is problematic & partially redundant with the Shapes sub-toolbars and sidebar https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=158253 I was not available to attend (it was during my work hours); but since this is not really about a bug, and since I believe the meeting saw anything but a serious discussion of this matter, I thought I'd reply to the list. I'll try to address some points regarding the issue of "Basic Shapes" vs "Gallery", and problems with what the Gallery has. I think this is relevant enough to bring this up on our mailing list even, since it's not about a specific bug but a large(ish) feature in our UI. So, A clip-art or media item gallery is certainly a useful thing to have. I'm not entirely sure it's important to have one built-in to the office app UI, but let's say we take that as a given. However - we should look at what our gallery actually contains: It's not just poor categorization. Just look at what's in there, and ask yourself if this is what we want to show users... but let me expand on that with a few examples: 'curved-left-arrow', 'curved-right-arrow' etc. -------------------------------------------------------- These four items in the Arrows category are all the exact same shape, but rotated in 4 directions and each with different coloring. We see this phenomenon a lot across the gallery: Artificially inflating the number of shapes with faux variety, which serves to obscures what the gallery actually offers. This shape is a sort of a "flattened-3D-stripe" kind of arrow, making a U-turn or 180-degree turn. There's a non-3D shape making a U-turn (item 3 in the arrow category) - with more flexible controls than the 3D-stripe shapes, i.e. you give up flexibility for a 3D-effect. This feels like a weird choice to need to make. What's entirely missing, though, are shapes other than a U-turn arrow with a similar 3D effect. Even, say, a 90-degree circular-arc stripe rather 180 degrees, or a more straight-angle turn. Or more decorative gallery items which complement the use of this effect. More importantly, though, is the fact that these shapes are not finalized media one puts into a gallery for display: They are building-blocks for drawing diagrams. In a media gallery, I would not expect to even have control points. So, if you look at the 'oval-arrow' shape, or the shape named 'top-arrows' - they have no control points; it might be a lot of fun if we could pull and tug and scale different aspects of it, but - we can't; it's a finalized, albeit vectorized, piece of clipart. We can take it apart and play with its sub-components, but it's not in itself intended as a flexible component. 'right-arrow', 'left-arrow', 'down-arrow', 'up-arrow' ---------------------------------------------- This is another example of four shapes, which are really just one shape with fake variety. For simple arrows, the gallery offers a one-sided and a two-sided arrow, and that's it. But this quadruplet of duplicates is an important example for another reason: It's a shape that's already part of "Basic Shapes", in the "Block Arrows" category. So, all four shapes are just duplicates of another shape, which we already have available in a more accessible way. ... except that the situation is actually worse than that. If you'll compare the gallery block-arrow and the "Block Arrows" block-arrow from the toolbar, you'll notice that the latter has a single control point, for the arrow shaft width; but the former has both that control point, and the one for arrowhead length. So not only do we have internal redundancy within the gallery; and not only is there redundancy between the gallery and the Basic Shapes; but "Basic Shapes" has been neglected in this respect, with a better version of a shape having been placed in the gallery instead of where it belongs. Shapes: 'textbox', 'header', 'title' ---------------------------------------------- These shapes are just textboxes, each with a string of text, and at a different font size. Supposedly, they stand for plain textbox, textbox that corresponds to your presentation's header text font, and textbox that corresponds to your presentation title font. In actuality, they're nothing of the kind: It's just Liberation Sans in three specific sizes. If you change the presentation styles or use a template - these shapes won't adapt; and their names will just be misleading. This is another example of a set of shapes which have artificial variation; but they are also three shapes that will never be used, except perhaps by mistake; and of shapes which, I argue, no user would consider placing in their clipart or media gallery, because of their complete triviality. It is as though the Gallery populators decided to pack some shapes for us, in case we got stranded on a deserted island where the toolbars and menus don't work, and we can only use the gallery to insert anything.... these three are at the same time silly and garish. It also doesn't help that their preview shows nothing but text on a white background, i.e. it's not even clear that they're textboxes unless you read their names. -- These are not the only examples of these issues - there's more where that came from. The gallery is very much a neglected feature: Its UI behavior and its contents. This, in contrast to the Basic Shapes - toolbar panel-buttons and a sidebar deck. Those have very informative icons; there is no redundancy; and the shapes are stripped of extra styling, like color variations etc. _That_ mechanism is in wide use (I strongly believe; I have no statistics about any of this). I have a strong suspicion that it is rarely used in practice. But there is some small use in having the Gallery as it is today: A rhetorical device against improving Basic Shapes... "If you want that shape, just put it in the Gallery". Eyal On 30/11/2023 16:25, Heiko Tietze wrote:
* Shapes-via-Gallery is problematic & partially redundant with the Shapes sub-toolbars and sidebar + https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=158253 + no point in changing the Gallery (Stuart) + the Gallery is a place for various content being sorted currently by tasks mostly; if we remove the line drawings, for example, it might become more polished but we loose functionality; nevertheless some items might be worth to challenge (Heiko) + categorization is in fact not perfect but providing improvements to the Gallery is beyond one ticket (Hossein) + not a fan of removing content rather better categorization (Hossein) => ticket not actionable => WF
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