Subject: Re: Features V stability
From: Sam TH (sam@uchicago.edu)
Date: Fri May 04 2001 - 01:39:44 CDT
On Thu, May 03, 2001 at 10:37:28PM -0400, Ron Ross wrote:
> A corrective followup to my previous post:
> I hope this is useful to others. It was a revelation to me, for
> off-topic reasons, because I was in the habit of using a feature of
> WordPerfect that should perhaps be considered a bug (or bad hack) and
> that I had even been considering for an AW bug report/feature request!
> On terminating a numbered paragraph, in all mentioned word processors,
> another such paragraph with an incremented number is automatically
> created. In AW and Word, if you hit return again, the listing is ended
> and you're back to "normal" (or whatever). In WP, a second return adds a
> newline previous to the new autogenerated numbered paragraph, pushing
> the latter and the cursor position down one line, and you can add as
> many such intermediate newlines as desired while preserving your
> position in the ordered paragraphs. This makes it easy, as a Normal
> User, to produce the desired spacing layout for listed items, in the
> same sense that the normal user usually hits return twice between
> paragraphs instead of defining inter-paragraph spacing in their default
> paragraph style. Moral: don't do that. But this also calls for a robust,
> logical, consistent and intuitive styles implementation and interface,
> which no word processor now provides. More on that later.
What do you think would be a good user interface to adding lines
between list items?
Currently, AW works like this:
If you hit return twice, it eliminates the new list element. In other
words, RET-RET behaves exactly like RET-BKSP.
There are a few possibilites here:
1. The second return could generate another new list element, leaving
the previous new one blank. [ This is how the first AW implementation
worked ]
2. The new return could behave like backspace, the way it currently
does in AW and Word.
3. The new return could insert a blank line *before* the current list
element, the way you describe WordPerfect working.
4. The new return could add another line to the document, at the end,
but without a list header on it.
The only way currently to insert the blank lines you are talking about
is to go back to the beginning of the line the new list element is on,
and hit return. I think this qualifies as definitely non-intuitive.
Does anyone have suggestions for improving this interface?
Thanks
sam th --- sam@uchicago.edu --- http://www.abisource.com/~sam/
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Sat May 26 2001 - 03:51:25 CDT