[scribus-dev] Who is going to kill the style dialog ?

[Gregory Pittman]

On 11/01/2010 02:38 AM, a.l.e wrote:
> hi greg,
>
>> The separations of various settings for Paragraph and Character
>> styles may make some sense, but since a Character style is a subset
>> of a Paragraph style, you should be able to see all these settings
>> when you work with a Paragraph style, rather than needing to jump
>> between tabs in the dialog. Maybe the answer might an expanded or
>> unexpanded sort of layout.
>
> after the UI-"disaster" in the PP / text tab, can we avoid expandable dialogs?

I wouldn't take the current PP/Text tab situation as an example of an 
expandable dialog (it's something of a hybrid mess). The dialog for 
choosing glyphs is more of an expandable dialog.

One of the things we suffer from in our hospital using a computerized 
medical record is that we have various bits of information in various 
programs, windows or dialogs if you will. There are many times when you 
must switch from one to another, then back again, maybe even back and 
forth, to understand what you need to know in a comprehensive manner. 
What you find very soon is how poor your memory is in keeping up with 
what you just saw one or two or more windows ago.

We tend to work with some mindset of what we are working with, but in 
complex situations like DTP layout this mindset can only have so much 
detail, so when we need to refresh detail it is good to have a single 
window/dialog to refer to, even if it's just informational.

Perhaps when a frame is selected, there can be a strip under the toolbar 
as a sort of "dashboard" (not really so fond of this term) of its 
settings/content. Obviously for a text frame, one set of information is 
there, for image frames, another. This might lead to a redesign or even 
abandonment of the PP as we now know it, having what currently is our PP 
become more of a dynamic structure, and frame- or object-oriented.

Greg