Frank Meies - Sun Germany - Development - Software Engineer wrote:
Hi William,
On 12/12/06 01:31, William Alan Yamada wrote:
This was discussed over a year ago and I don't think things have
changed. I don't think they've changed because I spent an hour trying
to figure out how to turn this 'nice feature' off. You can turn it off
in Word, and while I've just started using OpenOffice this sort of
thing will drive my crazy.
I guess I don't see how understanding how it works makes it a nice
feature. I would never change the formatting of a paragraph while
typing (I'd change the paragraph's style), and knowing how it works
just removes some of the mystery when the program does something I
don't want it to. It does not remove any of the frustration.
I originally raised this as an issue in 2005 on the bugtracker. For my
efforts I ended up with a large amount of what I can only describe as
aggressive BS over it. The issue was closed on the grounds that despite
being undocumented, it was 'designed behaviour'.
I was informed rather brusquely that I was 'only one user' and my single
vote on the subject didn't matter and the issue would be permanently
closed. Clearly it's not quite true that I was the only one who thought
this is a bad 'designed behaviour'.
I'm not sure if you are referring to
1. the question of the paragraph style
2. the 'backspace removes indent' feature
My quoted comment only refers to 1: Joining two paragraphs rises the
question which paragraph style should be used for the new, joined
paragraph. And will the new paragraph obtain the hard attributes from A
or B? The current implementation says: It depends on the operation:
Delete or backspace. For me this still is a nice feature. An other
option would be to always let the attributes of A win over B. Would this
be a better solution?
The issue here is the interaction between the two uses of backspace.
Joining paragraphs, and deleting indentation.
Back when I raised this issue, I went ahead and wrote a specification of
the behavior. Since it was undocumented.
###
Paragraphs can be joined by user action of delete at the end of a
paragraph or backspace at the beginning of an un-indented paragraph.
Paragraph formating style from the paragraph with editing focus will be
applied to the joined paragraph. (Delete retains formating of first
paragraph, backspace retains formating of second paragraph. Backspace on
beginning of an indented paragraph first removes the indent as defined
in "Bullets and Numberings part 1, 7.4")
###
Note the problem here. The Backspace key under this behavior had not
one, not two, but *three* context based actions. One of which is very
counter-intuitive, and afaik, still undocumented.
Under this behavior, you can not join two paragraphs with indents and
'save the formating of the paragraph', since backspace destroys the
indent, and the format of the paragraph with focus is always applied.
You may have wanted a system that lets you choose how to join paragraphs
with a single button press, but this one has a major design bug when
used with indented paragraphs.
The problem here, I think is the assumption that unnumbered indents
should also be deleted by backspace. Something that 'Bullets and
Numberings' (iirc) is vague about.
In my opinion, un-numbered and un-bulleted indent space should *not* be
deleted by backspace. The assumption that they are all 'the same' is a
programmer based one, not a user based one. Looking at it from the user
end, an indent without a bullet or number is a very different thing, and
you would expect it not to disappear on backspace since it's paragraph
formating not an editing item. While bullets, and list numbers are edit
items you'd expect to be deleted.
And all this *regardless* the point has been raised that this should be
under user control to be disabled if they want, and that Microsoft
Office does so.
Can we please have some movement on this issue?
- J. Barberio
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