Bug 114709 - New online help looks terrible
Summary: New online help looks terrible
Status: RESOLVED FIXED
Alias: None
Product: LibreOffice
Classification: Unclassified
Component: Documentation (show other bugs)
Version:
(earliest affected)
6.0.0.1 rc
Hardware: All All
: medium normal
Assignee: Not Assigned
URL:
Whiteboard: target:6.1.0
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks: New-Help
  Show dependency treegraph
 
Reported: 2017-12-27 10:05 UTC by Ulrich Windl
Modified: 2017-12-29 11:51 UTC (History)
6 users (show)

See Also:
Crash report or crash signature:


Attachments

Note You need to log in before you can comment on or make changes to this bug.
Description Ulrich Windl 2017-12-27 10:05:53 UTC
The changes in online help presented in https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/6.0 looks terrible (worse then what existed before). I wonder who made those design decisions:
In the image https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/images/thumb/7/7a/Screenshot_help-desktop.png/500px-Screenshot_help-desktop.png there are wide borders to the left and right of the page, the font is tiny to unreadable, and the lines are much too long.
Such design is against all reasonable design rules, and it's definitely no improvement!
Comment 1 Heiko Tietze 2017-12-27 12:51:36 UTC
Despite the cloud persona... you don't like whitespace or what in particular is that bad? Please elaborate "all reasonable design rules".
Comment 2 Buovjaga 2017-12-27 12:59:40 UTC
I guess the font size comes from the old font size used in the help viewer.

I made the design decision to center the content area with wide screens. It is not against reasonable design rules. To make it look better, we could have the header and footer be 100%, like in here: https://readthedocs.org/ See how the content in that one is centered as well (and context is documentation)?

If you have another idea, such as aligning everything to the left like here: https://docs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ please express it.

It is true that the font size and line length is bad right now and we should tweak it to result in a maximum of 85 characters per line.
Comment 3 Ulrich Windl 2017-12-27 13:24:39 UTC
(I wrote in comment #0)
> In the image
> https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/images/thumb/7/7a/Screenshot_help-
> desktop.png/500px-Screenshot_help-desktop.png there are wide borders to the
> left and right of the page, the font is tiny to unreadable, and the lines
> are much too long.
> Such design is against all reasonable design rules, and it's definitely no
> improvement!

(In reply to Heiko Tietze from comment #1)
> (...) Please elaborate "all reasonable design rules".
Recommended reading if you don't see the obvious after having read my complaints could be "Digital Typography" by Donald E. Knuth, just for example. Another title would be "Mut zur Typographie" by Jürgen Gulbins (German, obviously). Or try "Screen Design Manual" by Frank Thissen (ISBN 978-3-540-43923-3).
Comment 4 Ulrich Windl 2017-12-27 13:30:44 UTC
(In reply to Buovjaga from comment #2)
[...]
> It is true that the font size and line length is bad right now and we should
> tweak it to result in a maximum of 85 characters per line.

Depending on the line spacing (and the font being used), 85 characters could be too much already (Knuth recommends something like 66 characters per line).
My preference absolutely is:
1) A reasonable window size, meaning NOT too wide, because your eyes get lost while reading such long lines.
2) A reasonable default font size (with at most 72 characters per line)
3) Flowed text so that a resized window rearranges the text being displayed

So the most terrible solution would be a very wide window with tiny font and scrollbars for both dimensions (the current example almost has it all).
Comment 5 Xavier Van Wijmeersch 2017-12-27 19:47:17 UTC
I have no problems with the new design off the online help.
The font size may be a bit bigger but nice work Bouvjaga.


Best regards
Xavier
Comment 6 Commit Notification 2017-12-29 11:49:58 UTC
Ilmari Lauhakangas committed a patch related to this issue.
It has been pushed to "master":

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/help/commit/?id=50b850013374e0f711b5cded92739934d758bf1f

tdf#114709, tdf#112758, tdf#112757