Re: [libreoffice-design] Templates, styles, outline and bullets/numbering

2011/4/28 Greg <greg.lubel@gmail.com>:
> Hi,
>
> I believe Writer's template, style, outline and numbering facilities are in
> need of a rethink. The areas I think are weak, and this is by no means a full
> list, are:
> - The template organiser dialogue - who knows how to use it and what it's
> really for?
> - Style management - setting defaults, selecting style-sheets with some idea
> of the stylistic/visual impact, changing styles
> - Style usage - must become solid, robust and consistent. The impossibility of
> getting working single type or mixed type (numbered or bulletted) outline
> lists must be solved! At the moment, there seem to be three or four ways to
> control list hierarchies and only some (or one)  of them work. They are using
> the tab key, using the increase/decrease indent button, using the list or
> numbering styles or using the bullets and numbering's outline view. They each
> break the others in an unpredictable way!
>
> I think the user stories that press on the issues are something like:
>
> 1/ As a document writer, I want to ensure my document is easy to read because
> all the paragraphs, headers and lists are consistent in their style and
> outline level, according to their position in the document hierarchy.
>
> You can probably tell from this that I think we should strive to make styles
> and outline levels so easy to use (while not diminishing their full
> capabilities) that users predominantly use styles and not the ad-hoc editing
> methods that render most docs inconsistent and difficult to read.
>
> 2/ As a document writer, I want to be able to very easily select a style-sheet
> to change the look of my document, so I have a good idea of how the new style-
> sheet will look before I select it and I should not have to do much custom
> editing to get a style I like.
>
> 3/As a style-sheet writer or modifier, I want to see a style-sheet view of the
> world, that shows the hierarchy of styles and their setting inheritance and
> overrides, so that I can easily build and maintain a simple and logical style-
> sheet
>
> e.g. style settings inheritance and override hierarchy (This indented text
> illustrates the hierarchy, not a design ;o)
>
> -- Default (All settings, including outline levels)
>                --Paragraph text (overridden or new settings)
>                --Heading (overridden or new settings)
>                        --Heading1 (overridden or new settings)
>                        --Heading2 (overridden or new settings)
>                        --Heading3 (overridden or new settings)
>                --Header (overridden or new settings)
>                        --FirstPageHeader (overridden or new settings)
>                        --LeftHeader (overridden or new settings)
>                        --RightHeader (overridden or new settings)
>                --Footer (overridden or new settings)
>                        --FirstPageFooter (overridden or new settings)
>                        --LeftFooter (overridden or new settings)
>                        --RightFooter (overridden or new settings)
>                --List (overridden or new settings)
>                        --BulletList1 (overridden or new settings)
>                        --NumberList1 (overridden or new settings)
>                        --BulletList2 (overridden or new settings)
>                        --NumberList2 (overridden or new settings)
>                        --BulletList3 (overridden or new settings)
>                        --NumberList3 (overridden or new settings)
>
> 4/As a style-sheet writer or modifier, I want to lock a style-sheet to a
> document template, so that only that style-sheet can be used, so the documents
> produced are consistent.
>
> (personally, I'd like to see a way to lock out custom edits for selected doc
> templates too, for complete document consistency and compatibility - this is
> especially powerful for collaboratively authored docs)
>
> Aside from the implicated UI redesign, I think an extensive and professional
> set of style-sheets would greatly help matters.
>
> Any thoughts?
>
> Cheers,
>
> Greg
>
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At first I though that when you said "style sheets" you were talking
about templates... but you also use the word template. What do you
refer as "style sheet"?

I've never had problems with numbered lists (I mean, once I understood
how they work...), but I agree that they are not clear at all.
Most users I've seen tend to confuse numbered lists with outline
numbering, so a better distinction is needed.

The stylists have a "filter" (drop down menu bellow the styles list)
that shows the styles organized by hierarchy with a "tree view"
diagram, so that already exists. About an easy way to use styles, on
another thread I proposed a "style status/selector toolbar".

For my part, I think that the style handling on Writer is solid(1) and
easy to use... but not "new user friendly".
As I said on another thread, Writer is not the kind of program that
you can learn by trial and error: you actually need to *study* how it
works. The "potential barrier" a new user needs to climb before being
comfortable is high, but once that barrier is passed the program is
even easy to use.
We need to lower that barrier as much as possible, without losing the
valley that exists after that ;)

(1) The few point on which styles need to get better are, IMO:
      1- Linked page styles. You can link any style but page styles
      2- Math styles: they are completed absent
      3- Table styles: the autoformat for tables have some
shortcomings (no idea how this can be solved, though)
And about templates, the main problem is that the association between
a document and its parent template is quite weak: there is no easy way
to attach a given template to an already existing document and that's
a great limitation.

BTW, the template organiser dialogue is there to select your default
template, among other things like really organize (in folders, for
example) your templates :)

Cheers
Ricardo

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