Re: [Usability] Text-editing widget, attempt 2

[Stéphane Maniaci <stephane maniaci gmail com>]

> Hi St?phane!
>
> Is it really necessary or in any way beneficial to have a dialog with
> preview for inserting text instead of in-place editing?
>
No, I guess I can use directly the sidebar, I was just working on it seperatly.

> Adding text to a presentation, I either want to
>  * just click a text frame that's already on the slide because it's
> defined in the template/master and just write (even better if it already
> is focused), or
>  * click and write to add a text element that will be as wide as the
> text runs, or
> * click-drag to create a text frame I can write in immediately.

You're right, and this is all on my TODO list, but appears that we're
very late, so it might not land up right away, but it will come
eventually!

> Free running as opposed to framed text might be dispensable. If both
> exist, you should be able to turn one into the other.
>
> Basically, the first requirement is to get text in with least effort.
> Followed by being able to style text, immediately followed by being able
> to edit the style of groups of text at once.
>
> If you allow shadows on both text and images, you should try to make the
> controls uniform.
>  * Image and text objects could have the same shadow controls.
>  * There could be a shadow tool to add and control shadows for all
> objects that can have one.
>  * Shadows could be just one effect of several, where objects could have
> an effect stack.

Yes, for the moment I'm implementing those styling capabilities as
Interfaces, which means (I guess you're all programmers, but in doubt)
that every object that implements it, whatever is its type, gains the
ability to draw shadow. So yes I'm doing it in a Interface stack way.
>
> A central question to your project should be: how and where exactly do
> you want to improve on Impress or Powerpoint?

For the moment, I guess we just want a solid presentation editor, not
even trying to do better. But we have some cool features and ideas,
like the Flickr fetcher or a dynamic ruler, like the ones seen in
Pencil (sketching) or Gaphor.

> Message: 3
> Date: Wed, 21 Jul 2010 10:05:14 +0200
> From: Thorsten Wilms <t_w_ freenet de>
> To: usability gnome org
> Subject: Re: [Usability] Text-editing widget, attempt 2
> Message-ID: <1279699514 1615 34 camel charly>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
>
> On Wed, 2010-07-21 at 02:26 -0500, St?phane Maniaci wrote:
>
>> [0] : http://img16.imageshack.us/img16/2446/textwidget2.png
>
>
> The tab label is "Shadow", so an "Enable" might be enough for the
> checkbox. Though a "Draw shadow" or "Add shadow" wouldn't be bad.

I thought about "Enable", but it just looked too short :D.

> I'm not sure what Width does and would have to try it when faced with
> that interface.

I replaced that with "Size", how big is the shadow.

> "X" and "Y" make me think, "Horizontal" and "Vertical" much less so. You
> can avoid repetition by changing "Position" to "Offset".

Thought about this, but do you think it's the same for the average
user ? I think X & Y might bring people back to school, correct me if
I'm wrong. Second remark, maybe having a long word next to the
spinbutton looks better than a single letter ?

> The indent for groups below bold labels should be 12 px.
> http://library.gnome.org/devel/hig-book/2.30/design-window.html.en
>
> The spinners should be left aligned in relation to the sliders.
>
>
> I still hope you will do this without a dialog, or at least without
> Cancel/Insert, instant apply instead.

I changed that in my current, unfinished implementation.
> --
> Thorsten Wilms

Thanks for your feedback!

> thorwil's design for free software:
> http://thorwil.wordpress.com/

Stephane (throwing my accent away for Unicode reasons).