Re: [Libreoffice-ux-advise] drawing toolbar interactions

On Wed, 2011-07-20 at 17:23 +0200, Regina Henschel wrote:

Thanks to everyone for their replies.  I'll reply to various quotes.

From Regina:

> I know, I'm not a "normal" user, but I see no problem in the current 
> behavior. It is a nice feature in Draw and Impress, that *I* can decide, 
> whether I will use a tool permanently or not.

The problem is a bit compound.

First - If you make the drawing tools switch back to the Selection tool
by default, that makes the drawing workflow cumbersome *if* you don't
know that you needed to double-click the toolbar button.  (This is
buried in the Help (which no one reads) - I stumbled upon it by
accident, when trying to find the logic behind those "bPermanent" code
paths in the source).

Second - LibreOffice seems to be done to give preference to putting text
inside shapes.  This is actually quite nice when you are doing diagrams
like flowcharts, with text inside simple shapes - but it gets in your
way when you are trying to draw anything else.  As I use the drawing
tools in Impress, they frequently switch to the blinking text cursor.
This may be due to my "sloppy clicking", but I think *that* comes as a
result of me wanting to draw shapes when I've been switched back to the
Selection tool inadvertently.

(When I've seen my wife - who is definitely not a technical user - try
to draw things in Impress, she has often run into the same problem.  So
my usage pattern is not unique.)

I think we can make the drawing tools have a simpler user model, simpler
code, and more predictable behavior.

Inkscape suits me fine.  I played a bit more with it, and here's its
behavior:

1. You select a drawing tool; it gets highlighted in the toolbar.

2. You can press-drag-release to draw.  This leaves the shape you just
drew selected; you can of course tweak its handles then.

3. The current tool stays selected until you switch to another tool.

4. If a drawing tool is selected, and you single-click on an existing
shape in your drawing (i.e. press+release without dragging in the
middle), that shape gets selected.  This is a shortcut so that you don't
need to switch back to the Selection tool if the only thing you want to
do is select a shape.

5. You can toggle back and forth between the current tool and the
Selection tool by hitting the Spacebar (this is quite nice; even Corel
Draw had this behavior, and it lets you draw-tweak-draw-tweak in an
efficient fashion).

6. Hitting Esc unselects everything and maintains the current tool.
This is handy when you draw a shape, its handles appear, and you want to
draw something else, right by the existing handles - if you pressed on
them, you'd just edit the last-drawn shape; if you press Esc first, the
handles disappear and you can draw juxtaposed objects easily.

Now, Inkscape doesn't have LO's functionality of being able to put text
inside shapes automatically.  LO already lets you switch into "type
inside a shape" mode by double-clicking the shape, and that's fine.

From another of Regina's mails:
> In Draw the summary icon shows "pressed", if one of its sub tools is 
> active but not visible. If the sub window is open, the state
> "pressed" 
> it shown with the tool itself. The problem is in Writer and Calc.
> There 
> the summary icon does not show, that a tool from its sub window is
> active.

There's a bug in 3.3.1.2 (Astron mentioned it elsewhere) - you click on
the Rectangle tool, and:

1. The Rectangle tool's icon doesn't get highlighted

2. The "Basic shapes" combo gets highlighted, but it doesn't show a
rectangle; it shows a diamond.

3. When you draw, you draw a Rectangle.

So, there is a disparity between the actual tool and the tool that is
shown as active.

No idea if that is fixed in newer versions.

Regina again:
> A drawing toolbar in Writer and Calc does not know the state "single 
> operation" but a single click leads to "sticky" and a double click is 
> not possible. The problem in Writer and Calc is, that the icon is not 
> shown pressed, so that you can only guess from the mouse cursor
> symbol 
> which tool is active.

Oh, yeah, I just noticed this - the tool's icon is not shown highlighted
in Writer.  And the tool *is* sticky there!  Sounds like another
argument for getting rid of this inconsistency.

Astron said:
> What I don't really understand is why you think this behaviour works
> so well for the Calc/Writer use case – I think most users there need
> just one shape and then go back to writing/entering formulas etc.

This behavior creates this HUGE problem:

1. Go into Writer; type something.

2. Select a drawing tool; draw a shape.

3. Select some other drawing tools and draw some more shapes.

4. Each of those shapes is "separate" from the others, in that each has
its own individual anchor within the document.  Visually it looks like
the shapes belong to the same drawing, but when you change the text
(insert lines, etc.) the shapes move around because of the different
anchors.

I know that one should create a separate frame and draw *there*, but the
behavior by default, coupled with the visual effect, is really
confusing.


Now, about my patches:

So far, all I've got is the removal of the "permanent" mode.  Drawing
tools should not switch back to the Selection tool anymore.  There are
still parts of the code that switch back, but I think those are just for
special cases like "all of a bezier's nodes were deleted so we have
nothing else to do".

I haven't implemented "select a shape if you single-click on it" while a
drawing tool is active.  I don't really have a good idea of how to do
this; advice is appreciated :)

Also missing is the Spacebar functionality from Inkscape - that toggles
you between the current tool and the Selection tool.

Right now Esc indeed unselects everything, but doesn't maintain the
current tool.

(I'm trying to push my patches as a branch in git.freedesktop.org, but I
don't have write permission - just ssh access.)

  Federico