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Bug 245426 - Duplicate functionality in menubar in Compose a message dialog
Duplicate functionality in menubar in Compose a message dialog
Status: RESOLVED FIXED
Product: GtkHtml
Classification: Other
Component: Editing
3.18.x
Other other
: Normal normal
: ---
Assigned To: Evolution Product Design Team
Evolution QA team
evolution[composer]
Depends on:
Blocks: 310550
 
 
Reported: 2003-06-25 10:10 UTC by Eugene O'Connor
Modified: 2008-04-17 11:47 UTC
See Also:
GNOME target: ---
GNOME version: ---


Attachments
Proposed patch (1.86 KB, patch)
2008-04-16 21:19 UTC, Matthew Barnes
committed Details | Review

Description Eugene O'Connor 2003-06-25 10:10:36 UTC
In the Compose a message dialog, there are three ways to perform the 
following actions:

- Apply bold formatting to text
- Apply italic formatting to text
- Apply underline formatting to text
- Apply strikethrough formatting to text
- Apply alignment formatting to paragraph

The three ways are as follows:

1. Choose Format > Style > Bold | Italic | Underline | Strikeout.
   or 
   Choose Format > Alignment > Left | Center | Right.
2. Choose Format > Text. From the dialog, select the Bold, Italic, 
Underline, and Strikeout options.
   or
   Choose Format > Paragraph. From the dialog, select the Left, Center, or 
Right option.
3. Use the format toolbar.

There is no need to have two ways of performing these actions from the 
menubar. This has potential to confuse users.

Personally I think that the functionality in number 1 should be removed. 
The Text Properties and Paragraph Properties dialogs provide >>complete<< 
text and paragraph formatting functionality, the menu items (in number 1) 
provide only partial text and paragraph formatting functionality (no font 
color, no click will follow this URL).

But the important message is that there should be only one way of 
performing these tasks from the menubar.
Comment 1 Gerardo Marin 2003-06-25 23:35:44 UTC
Anna: Comments?
Comment 2 André Klapper 2004-06-23 09:58:57 UTC
still the same as described...
> rpm -qa |grep libgtkhtml
libgtkhtml3.0_4-3.0.10.0.200404140531-0.snap.ximian.8.1
libgtkhtml-2.4.1-54
libgtkhtml3.1_9-3.1.14.0.200405281008-0.snap.ximian.8.1
> rpm -q evolution1.5
evolution1.5-1.5.8.0.200405281008-0.snap.ximian.8.1

comments?
Comment 3 ABDUL RAUF 2005-05-23 11:46:29 UTC

Personally i won't  consider it as a bug 
Comment 4 Calum Benson 2005-05-23 12:38:29 UTC
Does seem like unnecessary bloat to me.  Making menus any more complicated than
they need to be usually detracts from the usability of a product.

I'm not sure I agree that the Text/Paragraph dialogs would necessarily be the
better ones to keep, though... the individual attribute menu items show the user
the keyboard shortcuts for those features, the dialogs don't.  And in an email
context, I'm not sure the user very often wants to change more than one
attribute at a time, which is the main advantage offered by the dialogs.  Anna
probably has a better idea of usage patterns from her usability studies, though.
Comment 5 André Klapper 2005-10-02 17:44:51 UTC
adding dependency
Comment 6 Karsten Bräckelmann 2006-01-08 22:13:53 UTC
Agreed to comment #4. Having the accelerators mentioned in the menu is important.
Comment 7 André Klapper 2006-02-09 22:18:00 UTC
why needinfo? reopening.
Comment 8 Matthew Barnes 2008-04-06 19:38:04 UTC
Any further comments about this?  These are the sorts of issues I'd like to get cleaned up in the new composer before it's released in Evolution 2.24.

There's actually a fourth way to change this stuff.  Right-click on a paragraph in HTML mode and select a Properties item from the pop-up context menu to display the same dialog as mentioned in the second method.

I'm +0 on removing the redundant submenus under Format.
Comment 9 Srinivasa Ragavan 2008-04-16 08:23:38 UTC
Im confused, why Bold, Italic, etc are in a dialog also. I think that dialog should be removed by moving the others as menus.

I haven't seen a text editor that has these in a dialog. But have them in direct menus and toolbar.
Comment 10 Matthew Barnes 2008-04-16 11:36:09 UTC
Srini, the story with the dialogs is in older versions of the composer we had a Properties window with multiple tabs /and/ each of those tabs also appeared as individual Properties dialogs.  It was a lot of duplicated Glade code.

Example:

   In Evolution 2.22 or earlier, type some text in HTML mode and right-click on
   it.  Then select "Style -> Text Style..." from the popup menu and you'll get
   the multi-tabbed Properties window with the Text tab selected.  Then from
   the main menu select "Format -> Text..." and you'll get the individual
   "Format Text" dialog.  Same UI, but duplicate Glade code.

For the new composer I decided to ditch the multi-tabbed Properties window to avoid the extra work, and just went with the individual Properties dialogs.

I'm fine with killing the Text and Paragraph Properties dialogs, but be aware that we'd have to drop "Properties -> Text..." and "Properties -> Paragraph..." from the popup menu as well.

Or I guess another option is to bring back the multi-tabbed Properties window just for the popup menu (keeping the Text and Paragraph tabs) but still kill the two Format items from the main menu.

Make sense?

Either way is fine with me.  The code is loosely coupled to the UI, so we can change around the UI pretty easily.
Comment 11 Srinivasa Ragavan 2008-04-16 16:03:20 UTC
We need to have a way to set the page style from the tool bar also then. That will be the only missing thing from popup menu and not there in the toolbar also.

Users who use r-click can use the rest from the toolbar itself. So if that is done, we can drop the right click popup.
Comment 12 Matthew Barnes 2008-04-16 21:10:18 UTC
Well, the popup menu also lets you edit properties for tables, cells, images, rules, and links.  They show up under the Properties submenu depending on what you right-click on, and each has its own dialog.  (Insert a table and right-click on it to see what I mean.)

Plus I think guenther would kill us if we dropped the right-click spell check replacement.  :)

Having chewed on it some more, I suggest we kill the "Text..." and "Paragraph..." items in the main menu (but not the dialogs they open) and leave the popup menu alone for now.  Basically what Calum said in comment #4.  The dialogs will still
be accessible from the popup menu.

I think that should be enough to close this bug, and we can brainstorm how to improve the popup menu and Properties dialogs in a different bug.
Comment 13 Matthew Barnes 2008-04-16 21:19:28 UTC
Created attachment 109390 [details] [review]
Proposed patch

If we go with my suggestion the changes are trivial.
Comment 14 Srinivasa Ragavan 2008-04-17 05:12:20 UTC
Oops I didnt mean the r-click popup, but the duplicate entries there. Sorry for the confusion. Looks fine to commit.
Comment 15 Matthew Barnes 2008-04-17 11:47:22 UTC
Committed to trunk (revision 8825).