https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=149230
--- Comment #3 from Eyal Rozenberg <[email protected]> --- (In reply to Mike Kaganski from comment #1) > So IMO it's natural ... etc. etc. ... no "bold"/"italic" and so on For a rather spartan example, but which take this approach at least partially, have a look at the LyX editor of LaTeX documents. It calls its approach "what you see is what you mean"; you mostly just can't apply direct formatting - although it is not oriented towards customizing styles. https://www.lyx.org/Screenshots (I'm not saying we should adopt any of this.) > I suppose that it would be reasonable to try to reuse the existing > pre-defined style set (I focus on Writer now) to provide a set of controls > that would suggest to apply *syntactic* meaning to text, where currently > similar controls allow to apply direct formatting. They could suggest to > *emphasize* text (= apply Emphasis style by default); or "create citation"; > or "make it a heading". (By the way, many Web tools already suggest similar > concepts - like buttons making some text "quotation" or "source code", so > possibly that could be partially familiar to users.) Indeed, the default style set is under-utilized. Its presentation is currently only a hint of something which you might want to use. I would also expect there to be UI which is "inviting" to the user to share information about aspects of their intended structure. One possible example would be numbering. Instead of the UI focusing on how a number/bullet and indentation would look on the current paragraph (which is the focus of both the buttons and the dialog right now), the focus would be the user telling LO about a list that they want to have: Whether is it a one-off list or whether they want to have recurring lists of the same kind; whether it is contiguous or interspersed with other content; whether list items are no-paragraph, a single-paragraph or multi-paragraph (do we have an open issue about this feature?); what name should this kind of list be given (= the style); whether it is single-level or multi-level; and on with features such as association with paragraph styles. This could happen in an "add list" wizard. And we could have a "convert to list" wizard. If those were the buttons rather than "slap a number onto it and don't ask any questions", you could say we have moved the UI to be more style-focused. This makes me think of how, when examining existing styles (default or non-default), we are not presented with their raison d'etre, or if you will, the "elevator pitch" for using them. They're just names in a list (or tree) in a sidebar. Guidance on how to format with styles should also be more immediately accessible (in the sense of "Are you trying to do X? Let us explain how you can do it the LO way" and such). > and other more advanced tools. Perhaps a style search, which in addition the the style name, would also search some paragraph(s) of explanatory text about when and what for the style is to be used. > There need to be a way to apply direct formatting - but those controls need > to only appear on explicit request ("Format selection directly", maybe > showing some toolbar that would close automatically after use). Or perhaps with a global toggle between "Style-oriented mode" and "Direct-formatting-oriented mode". > I hope that the correct naming of the controls This is important. But the button design would be even more challenging, since the level of abstraction buttons represents would now typically rise. -- You are receiving this mail because: You are the assignee for the bug.
