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Hi Christoph, Astron,

Here is a small update to tell you that we have some progress.

On Wed, 2011-08-24 at 00:18 +0200, Christoph Noack wrote:
By the way, I played a bit with the colors and noticed that if you
select black, then everything (border, text, fill) is drawn in black.
When selecting dark green, the fill gets a very intensive light green...

Fixed.

However, one thing that drives me mad is the ghosting - you've clarified
for Astron. Let's pick the use case that people anchor pictures in the
header/footer to use them in the page background - then the picture is
dimmed when editing. Thus, it gets very hard for users to really judge
the contrast of foreground/background. Consequently, this is an
accessibility/usability issue then.

I completely reverted the ghosting.

Okay, so let's start to draft a proposal together ... I've made up a
quick sketch:
https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/NUEuQ6j9CINyL_MSY67zUg?feat=directlink

The core ideas:
      * Document content does not get altered (ghosting) to keep the
        visual impression for the user. (Note: If the headers/footers
        are disturbing, then we need a "Draft" view or users should use
        the "Web View").

This is fixed as mentioned above.

      * Accessing the headers/footers is possible without double-click
        (a single click is sufficient). To prevent unwanted changes of
        the header/footer, your visualization is used to explain what
        this is about. In this case, the header/footer work the same way
        as the document content, frames, tables, ... its consistent. So,
        luckily, we can avoid another "mode" - although the "go back via
        ESC" might be kept.

I had quite a hard time implementing the single click behavior as I
found out another usability bug: the background pictures were not
selectable at all.

Anyway, this is now implemented. The text boundaries are also shown only
for the edited area to highlight it even better.

      * Visualization (separator):
              * If a header/footer is available (see the upper part),
                then the tag is attached to the header's border. This
                matches the position of the real header. And, it
                prevents the unwanted drawing effects Cor once mentioned
                if distance header/document content is zero.

The zero-distance case will alway be a problem. I left it as it is as
discussed during the Hackfest.

              * If no header/footer is available (see lower part), then
                the potential footer area is marked. Thus, the user may
                use the options button to add a footer there.
      * Options button: As you and others already pointed out, it would
        be a chance to make things easier to use. I'm still not sure
        whether we'll use the "Notes" like drop-down, or whether we will
        add the most common actions directly to the tab (is also a space
        issue)

Button and dropdown menu on the separator label is still not yet
implemented: that's the next thing I'ld like to work on.

So, the only thing that's still unresolved is the "users can select
items anchored to the header/footer too easily". So, if this is an edge
case (I assume), then might the following proposal work form an
developer's point-of-view?
      * If the focus in within the document are, and if an object is
        anchored in the header/footer and is placed on the document
        content area (maybe: only if document text is there as well),
        then it will only react to a double-click (like your
        implementation). Because ...
              * We might add a tool tipp to explain that: "Double-click
                to edit"
              * If single clicking doesn't work, most users react with
                repeated clicks - finally it will get selected.

Done, but no tooltip at the moment and a minor selection issue.

      * If the focus is within header/footer, then editing of those
        objects should be possible with a single click (like you've
        already implemented it).

Done.

      * Here, users should be made aware what's happening - so if these
        items get edited, then the header/footer highlighting should be
        shown.

Done

Details are missing:
      * Design of the tabs - they need "direction" (e.g. two rounded
        corners) and a detailed options buttons layout.

As discussed a gradient will be added... but when the rest will be
already in a good shape.

      * Position of the tabs - it might make sense to move them into the
        visible area, if the user won't see it due to the current zoom
        level / viewport.

This was quite a pain for me to implement, but I finally found out that
Notes' code was of great help for this. I had it working in the Geneva -
Lyon train back from Hackfest.

      * Mouseover - it might make sense to respond to hovering
        header/footer areas by showing the tabs or something like that
        after some time. Then, the options are directly available for
        the users - even if no headers/footers are available.

Good idea, but not implemented yet.

      * If people don't like the document borders (e.g. for the
        header/footer), then we should check whether all should be
        replaced. Once I made a proposal that got implemented into
        Symphony ;-) Here is the proposal page:
        http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/DocumentBorder

I implemented the option 3 here. I also simplified the boundaries mark
when there are footnotes in the document: the footnotes are included in
the main body area. It shouldn't harm, doesn't seem too stupid and avoid
having too many decoration items when there are several footnotes in a
document.

Those changes have been pushed to master... so you can get them with the
next daily build.

Regards,

-- 
Cédric Bosdonnat
LibreOffice hacker
http://documentfoundation.org
OOo Eclipse Integration developer
http://cedric.bosdonnat.free.fr


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