On Sun, 2005-01-30 at 01:33 -0600, Peter Kupfer wrote: > Ralph Aichinger wrote:
> > I applaud this change, "Stylist" always made pictures of the > > stereotypical gay hairdresser from your average hollywood movie > > come up[1] in my head, and IMHO this term is not clear at all. The new > > term might not be as concise, but it explains much better what is going > > on. > > What is unclear about a list of styles being called the Stylist. Well maybe I am giving this a more philosophical treatment now than it deserves, but here we go: What I think was the largest problem with the old term "Stylist" is that it wrongly implies, that the so-called "Stylist" is about styling, which -- and native speakers of English, please do correct me if I am wrong -- implies some sort of ornamentation or making pretty after the fact. Is the Stylist about making pretty? About adding ornaments? Hell, no! The so-called "Stylist" is, foremost, about *structure*, and while this is still not *that* clear in the new term, it is much less misleading now, IMHO. When you select "Heading 1" in the dialog, yes, you make it appear as "Adobe Garamond Titling 24pt" or whatever, but even more important: You mark up the document structure, as can be easily seen after PDF export (in OOo 2.0) or when creating a TOC. > Further, I want to know the rationale, I fear it is another one of > these, everyone else calls it this so we should. Does everybody call it "Stylist"? When I first encountered StarOffice, the term was new to me (for Software). Introducing new, uncommon terms adds to the learning needed to become productive in a program. > I think this is a silly reason to change. If there are valid reason for > a change fine. However, we are told that there aren't enough developers > and the project has been delayed. If this is true, why are changing > things that aren't broken? Because some people -- and that certainly includes me -- consider misleading terminology and usability problems maybe the worst kind of brokenness a software can have. Just to tell a bit about my background: I am responsible for a small network of about 20 computers with about 100 to 150 users (not all at the same time, of course), and usability problems are *really* troubling me in my everyday work, and cause lots of "cost" in terms of *my* time. I cannot imagine it to be that much different in any other setting with lots of end-users. But these are the places we have to "get" to make a serious dent into the main competitor's market share. If usability was that unimportant compared to technical stability and results produced, everybody would be using LaTeX right now. But people are not. > Each language project gets to pick its own name, so Germany might opt > back to the old version. Italy is sticking with Stylist. ATM German is more relevant to me, because German and English localisations are the ones I mainly use. I do think however having a more consistent terminology across all localisations would be beneficial. But who am I to tell the Italian team what to do? [new terminology in 2.0] > Here is a brief list: > <http://oooauthors.org/groups/authors/userguide2/resources/ui_string_changes> Thanks a lot! This document (and the one David posted) is very helpful to me. /ralph -- Rettet die Wale und stÃrzt das System, und trennt euren MÃll, denn viel Mist ist nicht schÃn! Gustav, "Rettet die Wale" --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
