Everything is easy, if one knows how. By the same token, many things are difficult until one learns how. To my mind, reducing the slope of the learning curve is one of the objectives that programmers should have in mind when designing an application for the general public. Being able to change both spell (and for that matter, grammar) checking and keyboard input directly from the toolbar with a few mouse clicks are features which greatly flatten the learning curve for users who must often switch from one European language to another in the same document. As Kirill points out, the competition has been doing so for at least a decade, which demonstrates the feasibility of the exercise ; what then can be the reasons for OO.o not to do so ? Would this make things more difficult for those who already have learnt how to manipulate styles ? I think not - surely it would be possible to both include the means to manipulate these two parameters from the toolbar and retain the present styles option ! Then, after a couple of years, one could approach OO.o users and inquire which technique they use in practice and, on the basis of the answers received, decided whether to retain both methods in a newer version or select only one of them. Or am I missing something here ?...
Henri 2007/2/11, Kirill S. Palagin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> -----Original Message----- > From: Jonathon Blake [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: Sunday, February 11, 2007 11:56 AM > > Henri wrote: > > > one and the same document, changing from one to the other is much > > easier in Word, requiring only a couple of clicks on a > toolbar icon, than in Writer. > > Perhaps in a future OO.o 3.0 this problem/difficulty could > be addressed ?... > > With a complete set of styles for each language that is used, > it takes roughly 5 mouse clicks to get to a style that hasn't > been used. If it has been used, then a single mouse click > will switch style/language. > [This _might_ require some customization of the formatting toolbar. ] > > xan > > jonathon 1. You have to define the styles first. Not only that requires more than 5 clicks, but some knowledge. This raises more entry barriers for new users, especially converts from competition. 2. Still it should not be necessary - user already indicated the language by switching keyboard layout. 3. Competition already does this for all languages (for 10 years already!), we already know how to do this for Asian languages, so why not allow layout switch to change the language of text?
