Re: [libreoffice-design] Cleaning up the default toolbars

Hi Regina,

On Sat, Nov 24, 2012 at 5:27 PM, Regina Henschel <rb.henschel@t-online.de>wrote:

> Hi Mirek,
>
> Mirek M. schrieb:
>
>  Hi everyone,
> > Now that we want to bring a new icon scheme to LibreOffice and make large
> > icons the default, it'd be good to make the top toolbars a bit more
> > compact
> > as well.
> > In particular, I was thinking we could condense the standard toolbar
> > enough
> > to share a row with the formatting toolbar.
>
> I don't think that it is possible, because the style and font drop-down
> lists are rather wide.


I agree.
It'd be great to have the font picker condensed into a button. [2] (The
reasoning behind it boils down to the ux-visual-hierarchy principle [3],
as the other commands on the formatting toolbar tend to be more commonly
used, thus deserve more space and prominence, and, when it comes to fonts,
we really want to encourage the use of styles.)
Now that we have style previews, there should be nothing stopping us.

But there are indeed some candidates of icons, that can be dropped totally.
> Unfortunately different users will consider different icons as being
> unimportant.


That's why it'd be preferable to put them under a visible menu instead,
with a "Customize..." button at the end, so that the user can easily find a
hidden command and bring it back to the toolbar if he needs to.

> As a first step, I would propose to create a drop-down menu at the end of
> > the toolbar, similar to that in Google Chrome or elementary applications
> > [1]. This menu should hold all the items that we determine not to be
> > important enough to show all the time, but useful enough not to be hidden
> > by default. At the end of the menu, there should be a "Customize..."
> > entry,
> > so that people who have gotten used to a certain button being shown all
> > the
> > time can bring it back easily.
>
> That feature is already there. Decrease the width of the application
> window, so that the toolbar is wider than the window. You get an arrow at
> the end of the toolbar.


I was thinking something more akin to a persistent, non-expanding Tools
menu, as seen in Google Chrome or elementary.
The advantage would be a cleaner default UI and a step toward being able to
hide menu bars on systems where applications without them are a standard
(elementary OS, and increasingly Windows and GNOME as well).


> The real problem is, that this does not work in between. If you have two
> toolbars in one row (e.g. the standard toolbar and the find-toolbar) then
> the first one uses all place it can get to show all of its icons. It is not
> possible to restrict the width of a toolbar to a fixed value.


How about this then: a toolbar that is right-aligned has preference over a
left-aligned toolbar. In other words, LibreOffice hides its icons only if
all of the left-aligned toolbar's icons on the same line are hidden.
See this mockup for illustration:
https://ubuntuone.com/7kamSlZ9XJsmdrq9a4zBYh.
(The original layout is here: https://ubuntuone.com/2c4HichNKuWplCJDwWRAA5.)

> > This menu should be easy enough to implement, I hope. If a developer wants
> > to do more, he could implement aligning toolbars to the right or
> > drag-and-drop for easy customization, but it's not a necessity right now.
> >
> > What do you think?
>
> I would like to have standard toolbars that are as similar as possible for
> all modules. That would not be possible when mixing it with the formatting
> toolbar.


> The formatting toolbar depends on active context. With active picture you
> have another one than in simple writing mode or with text edit mode of
> graphics.
>
> People like to handle toolbar position different on large screens and on
> small netbooks, for example put the standard toolbar to the left on
> netbooks.


> So no, I do not like the idea of merging the toolbars. I would more like
> it, if I could fix the width of a toolbar.



I think you misunderstood the proposal -- there was nothing about merging
the standard toolbar with the formatting toolbar.

> Kind regards
> Regina
>
>
> > [1]
> > http://elementaryos.org/docs/**human-interface-guidelines/ui-**
> > toolkit-elements/toolbars/**appmenu<http://elementaryos.org/docs/human-interface-guidelines/ui-toolkit-elements/toolbars/appmenu>
[2] http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/File:F-list.png
[3] http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Design/Principles

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