[Libreoffice-ux-advise] 2 Suggestions for improving the handling of Pictures in LO

Hello!

I hope it is not impolite to post UX suggestions to this list. LO has been
improving quite a lot since the split from OOo, to me it feels as if there
was a completely new culture and focus on UX improvements, where
before there was lots and lots of specification, but little change.
One area in my own use, where I think that LO currently lacks is
handling of images (photos, frames, etc.). Things that drive me
crazy:

1) It is much too easy to change the aspect ratio of a picture.
There is really no scenario where you want to distort a photo
by changing width and height out of sync, except maybe making
gimmicky jokes and possibly neutral page backgrounds. Rare is
the occasion that I really want to distort people's heads or figures in
a picture, just because I grab it at the wrong handle.

This holds even if I choose Picture->Type->Size->Keep ratio
is selected manually.

My suggestion: Make "Keep ratio" ticked by default, and
never ever change the aspect ratio by dragging the picture
handles as long as this is ticked. In the unlikely situation
that somebody wants to distort pictures, he or she can
always remove that tick mark. I very much doubt this
is more often than one in a thousand cases.

2) There are four anchor types: To page, to paragraph, to
character and As character. What bothers me, is that
the picture moves if I click through these selections. Except
in the last case, this should not be necessary. If I switch
say from "To page" to "To paragraph", LO could "transform
coordinates" and simply keep the object on the same place,
and fill in new values for coordinates accordingly. Would that
be too complicated? I don't think there is a situation where
you want to change the position (let's say the picture to jump
into the left top corner) when you switch anchor type. I really
do not know the complexity of calculating the coordinates
from paragraph/page/character, but if this is possible, I
think keeping the position and changing coordinates would
be more intuitive and the thing I expect.

These are my two main nits with LO at the moment, and after
stepping down from my soapbox, I want to thank you for
your great UX work, it is very welcome. It might be baby
steps here and there, but all together the work is really
noticeable.

Thanks,
Ralph Aichinger.
_______________________________________________
Libreoffice-ux-advise mailing list
[hidden email]
http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/libreoffice-ux-advise

Hi Ralph,

On Sat, 2012-06-02 at 14:28 +0200, Ralph Aichinger wrote:
> I hope it is not impolite to post UX suggestions to this list.

        It's really designed for developers to ask UX designers for input, and
to improve that interaction.

> 1) It is much too easy to change the aspect ratio of a picture.

        Completely agreed; IIRC last time there was a suggestion to change the
default re-size mode to keeping the aspect ratio, and to make
'shift-resize' mangle it - a number of people objected.

        To me that'd be an obvious slam-dunk change but ... ;-) perhaps we can
re-discuss that here - it seems to me that people very often do this,
and then move on - only coming back later to discover the distortion,
and having lost the real aspect ration in the meantime.

> There is really no scenario where you want to distort a photo
> by changing width and height out of sync, except maybe making

        The question is "what is a photo" ? :-) a .jpeg ? but the file type is
not necessary close-to the picture, etc. And over-complicating this to
make it work differently for different picture types would perhaps cause
more problems than the cure ;-)

> 2) There are four anchor types: To page, to paragraph, to
> character and As character. What bothers me, is that
> the picture moves if I click through these selections. Except
> in the last case, this should not be necessary. If I switch
> say from "To page" to "To paragraph", LO could "transform
> coordinates" and simply keep the object on the same place,
> and fill in new values for coordinates accordingly. Would that
> be too complicated ?

        Patches much appreciated here :-) the experience sounds extremely
sensible to me - having said that it is quite possible that the
algorithm to calculate retaining the exact position is unfeasibly hard
to implement. Trying to make the (iterative) layout calculate itself
backwards to get that precisely right sounds like it might be extremely
hard.

        Do you use to-page anchoring much ? it's one of the features that
causes serious problems with writer layout complexity.

        Thanks !

                Michael.

--
[hidden email]  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot

_______________________________________________
Libreoffice-ux-advise mailing list
[hidden email]
http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/libreoffice-ux-advise