Description: It is nearly impossible to find empty text boxes in a document. No bounding box or anything. However, by mousing around and watching the cursor change from an arrow to a grab cursor it is possible find the otherwise-invisible box. Text boxes need some indication of their existence when they do not have focus, such as a thin light gray line. Steps to Reproduce: 1. Create new Draw document 2. Create a text box with a single space for content 3. Click outside the document. 4. Have fun finding your text box. :) Actual Results: Clicking inside invisible text box does nothing. Must move cursor over frame of text box and click to make visible. Expected Results: Draw should display some indication of the boundaries of the text box. Reproducible: Always User Profile Reset: No Additional Info: Version: 6.0.2.1 Build ID: 1:6.0.2~rc1-0ubuntu0.16.04.1~lo1 CPU threads: 6; OS: Linux 4.13; UI render: default; VCL: gtk3; Locale: en-US (en_US.UTF-8); Calc: CL User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:58.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/58.0
Hi Jon, Once created a text box, if you give it a name Format > Name You will find it easily by openning the Navigator into Sidebar or By View > Navigator(F5), and choosing Named shapes into Show Shapes. If Text boxes have no name, this is clearly harder. The generic names Shape X don't work into the navigator tofind it. This was the subject of an other report, but I don't remember its number right now.
If the Text box draw object is not populated on creation, it is immediately removed and will not be saved to the ODF document. To convince oneself, save to a Flat ODF XML, e.g. .fodg, or .fodt to review the document structure. No empty (uninstantiated) Draw Text Box objects will be present.
Just noticed in the STR you'd entered a Space (but a NPC would do) so not empty. But is this realistic to need to locate a Text Box Draw object that is not populated with text?
(In reply to V Stuart Foote from comment #2) > If the Text box draw object is not populated on creation, it is immediately > removed and will not be saved to the ODF document. > > To convince oneself, save to a Flat ODF XML, e.g. .fodg, or .fodt to review > the document structure. No empty (uninstantiated) Draw Text Box objects will > be present. However, you will find the entry in the Undo list.
(In reply to V Stuart Foote from comment #3) > Just noticed in the STR you'd entered a Space (but a NPC would do) so not > empty. But is this realistic to need to locate a Text Box Draw object that > is not populated with text? With a space, yes, that is definitely an edge case. However, there is a UX problem here, especially if you pair it with the problem that you can only edit text in a text box by either double-clicking on the frame or on the text itself (bug #116342). Not only does this problem ignore Fitts' Law, but it also does not match behavior in PowerPoint or Publisher. Please understand that both bugs are not major ones, but Draw suffers from death by a thousand papercuts.
(In reply to Jacques Guilleron from comment #1) > Hi Jon, > > Once created a text box, if you give it a name > Format > Name > You will find it easily by openning the Navigator into Sidebar > or By View > Navigator(F5), and choosing Named shapes into Show Shapes. > If Text boxes have no name, this is clearly harder. The generic names > Shape X don't work into the navigator tofind it. This was the subject of an > other report, but I don't remember its number right now. Thanks for the tip! I've used used Star/Open/LibreOffice for more than a decade and wasn't aware you could name elements and then find them in the Navigator. However, do you think this is a realistic workflow, especially for Joe/Jane User?
Related: bug 107825 and bug 98856
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 62494 ***