https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=83071
Priority: medium
Bug ID: 83071
Assignee: [email protected]
Summary: UI: User interface for outline numbering is confusing.
Severity: normal
Classification: Unclassified
OS: Windows (All)
Reporter: [email protected]
Hardware: x86-64 (AMD64)
Status: UNCONFIRMED
Version: 4.2.5.2 release
Component: Writer
Product: LibreOffice
For someone that is not familiar with the user interface for outline numbering
it can be very hard to find out how to achieve this common task. What you can
do is:
Define some paragraph styles that you want to use as outline headers using the
F11 --> Paragraph Styles. Using the “Outline & Numbering” tab you can define an
outline level and a suitable numbering style. Unfortunately this does not work
as expected: It defines a list style for this paragraph which is independent of
the outline level. Of course you can modify the list level such that it
corresponds to the outline level using the tab key while the cursor is at the
start of a paragraph – but this is not the idea behind the outline level.
This behaviour suggests that the outline level does not work. The problem is
that there is no hint that you are at the wrong way, that you cannot define the
outline numbering using the “Styles and Formatting” user interface and that you
have to go to Tools --> Outline Numbering to achieve your goals.
You may run into predefined outline headers. What you see in the “Outline &
Numbering” tab is that you cannot change neither the outline level nor the
corresponding style for no obvious reason.
It is not at all obvious how the “Numbering Style” dialogue works as there is
no continuous feedback that tells the user how the result looks like. It is not
clear that the elements shown in the “Bullets”, “Numbering Style”, “Outline”
and “Image” tabs are in fact buttons, and pressing the button changes the
style. If some area is marked this does not indicate how the list style looks
like - it merely indicates that the button is selected. Pressing the button
does not have any visible effect except moving the focus to the button. The
actual effect on the style can be seen only after switching to the “Position”
or “Options” tabs. It is also unclear why these tabs use different ways to
visualise the effects of the style, and why these visualisations sometimes
differ.
Expected behaviour:
a) It should be possible to find the “Outline Numbering” style in the “Styles
and Formatting” dialogue. Maybe an additional button in the top part of this
dialogue could help. It should open the dialogue that can be found under “Tools
--> Outline Numbering”.
b) The “Numbering Style” dialogue should always show the visualisation of the
current resulting style. For this purpose the two different visualization used
in the “Position” and “Option” tags should be unified into one common
representation that is visible outside the tabbed area.
c) The “Outline & Numbering” tab in the “Paragraph Style” dialogue should
contain some hint to the “Tools --> Outline Numbering” dialogue. This could
reduce the risk to confuse the functionality between “List Styles” and “Outline
Numbering” and would be helpful especially in cases when this dialogue does not
allow to change the outline level and/or the list style.
Observed with LibreOffice version 4.2.5.2 and Windows 7.
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