From post by Ismael to planet OOo:
http://lebasket.free.fr/blog/index.php?2007/06/12/17-gsoc-two-styles-of-tabs
(Ismael Merzaq — GSOC: two styles of tabs)
This is one of the "systemic" issues with OOo. The fact that the whole
OpenOffice.org has legacy in Windows, it makes very difficult to port
to other user interfaces, if the mandate is to not touch the UI layout
itself at all. The port will likely have inferior design, no matter
how many shiny blue buttons you throw at it.
The ideal solution would be to reduce the number of tabs to acceptable
level (= 1 row). However this will probably never happen.
Other almost good alternative would be to re-design the UI so that
some other native Aqua UI element than normal tabs are used for
selecting the different "pages".
The undesired solution is to use Aqua in ways that it was never meant
to (e.g. two-row tabs).
Some hacks that are not good, but slightly better than two-row tabs would be:
a) scrollable one-row tabs bar (left and right arrows on the ends of
the tab row)
b) expanding one-row tabs bar, where active tab has full text, while
rest is truncated with something like "strin..."
c) instead of horizontal tab bar, a vertical menu on the left side,
similar to the OOo Preferences dialog (not Options, btw :)
Mox
