Bug 118136 - "Rename slides" usability and better placeholder names
Summary: "Rename slides" usability and better placeholder names
Status: NEW
Alias: None
Product: LibreOffice
Classification: Unclassified
Component: Impress (show other bugs)
Version:
(earliest affected)
6.0.4.2 release
Hardware: All All
: medium enhancement
Assignee: Not Assigned
URL:
Whiteboard:
Keywords:
: 118135 129012 142906 (view as bug list)
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2018-06-13 06:16 UTC by Explorer09
Modified: 2024-03-22 20:11 UTC (History)
4 users (show)

See Also:
Crash report or crash signature:


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Description Explorer09 2018-06-13 06:16:13 UTC
Description:
The "Rename slides" feature in Impress is not quite useful, at least for my own workflow in crafting a presentation. And the rename feature is not easily discovered (the slide names are only seen on hover tooltips of the slide thumbnails and on the "Navigator" side pane). For me I didn't even know they can be renamed until I modified a slide from a corporate template (in place, without duplicating). (And exported it to PDF and realized that the names are used in PDF bookmarks - see bug 118135.)

I don't know of any use of such "slide names" other than PDF bookmarks (are they meant for machine-readable identifiers, or are they meant for remarks for humans?), but my impression is that slide title texts are already enough to identify slides without needing other explicit "names" (slide numbers are less useful as the slides my be reused in another presentation and users may print slides out of context). So I think there's a usability issue here.

I hope this report can:
1. Tell me or other users about the usefulness for slide names.
2. If the slide name feature is to stay, then give us more intelligent placeholder slide names, other than "Slide 1", "Slide 2", etc.

Steps to Reproduce:
1. In LibreOffice Impress, create a new, blank presentation.
2. Make four slides (Press Ctrl-M three times).
3. Edit the titles in the *contents* of four slides so they are "Foo", "Bar", "Baz" and "Baz" respectively.
4. Select the second slide, use "Slides" -> "Rename slides" to name it "Barred".
5. Open "View"->"Navigator" and see the slide names.
6. Go to "View"->"Slide Sorter" and move your mouse cursor over each of the slide thumbnails.

Actual Results:  
The slide names shown in steps 5 and 6 are "Slide 1", "Barred", "Slide 3" and "Slide 4" respectively (name varied on your LibreOffice language).

Expected Results:
A more intelligent naming should be used on unnamed slides. For example slides with title text box, the title text should be used on the slide names.

I.e. "[Foo]", "Barred", "[Baz]", "[Baz]"
Or: "Foo", "Barred", "Baz", "Baz"


Reproducible: Always


User Profile Reset: No



Additional Info:
I have a rough algorithm in my mind for intelligently picking a (placeholder) slide name, if it can be implemented:

1. If the slide features a title text box, and it's content is not empty, then just use the title text as slide names.
2. Otherwise, if the slide contains a content text box, and if it contains non-empty text, then uses the _first line_ of the content text as slide name, followed by ellipsis if more content follows.
3. If the slide's content box contains only a chart, and is chart has a title, use the chart's title as the slide name. If it doesn't have a title, use "[Chart]" as slide name.
4. Similarly, if the slide's content box contains a table, image, audio or video, use "[Table]", "[Picture]", "[Audio]" or "[Video]" as the name. Do so only if the slide has no other text content boxes (floating text boxes are not considered).
5. If the slide can be determined to be blank, use "[Blank]".
6. If it's none of the above, use the generic "[Unnamed Slide]" as the slide name.
And I welcome more suggestions on this.


User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:60.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/60.0
Comment 1 Heiko Tietze 2018-06-25 08:28:38 UTC
Right click > Rename Slide or Slide > Rename Slide, both work well for me. If you need a shortcut, just customize it (doubt many users do rename). Admitted, the Navigator is buggy and lacks on good usability (we have plenty of tickets about this), but the issue here is "Provide easy means to rename a slide", and that's working.

Slide 1..Slide n are standard names and I don't see any issue with it. Keep in mind that names have to be unique.

Feels free to reopen the ticket.
Comment 2 Explorer09 2018-06-25 10:40:40 UTC
(In reply to Heiko Tietze from comment #1)
> but the issue here is "Provide easy means to rename
> a slide", and that's working.
> 

My enhancement request for this is about Automatic names based on slide titles or other content. The aim was to not needing to rename slides for most cases when default names work. (The cases that would need the rename are slides with obscure content, and the title text cannot be used for some reasons related to the presenter.)

> Slide 1..Slide n are standard names and I don't see any issue with it. Keep
> in mind that names have to be unique.

The issue I saw is that the usage of these names are obscure (not clearly documented), and I almost did trial and error to figure out where they have been used.

For now I found two usage of the slide names:
1. As bookmark names when exported to PDF.
2. As "Target in Document" of hyperlinks or objects with Interaction (upon mouse-click).

The uniqueness requirement is justified for both uses of the names, but for most presenters (users), trying to pick unique names for slides and make them working for both usages is a boring task. Therefore it's better to give good automatic names and free the users from doing the task in the first place - this is what my report is about.

The Slide 1..Slide n you-called-standard naming have problems:

1. It's not descriptive for bookmark names (bug 118135), at least for people navigating the document.
2. It's dependent on viewer's LibreOffice locale, rather then the document's perceived language.

With the slide names based on slides' own title (plus suffixes " (2)", " (3)" etc. if needed), both problems can be avoided most of the time.
Comment 3 Timur 2018-06-25 12:10:56 UTC

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 107932 ***
Comment 4 Heiko Tietze 2020-06-19 14:59:35 UTC
*** Bug 118135 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Comment 5 Heiko Tietze 2020-06-19 15:08:12 UTC
We discussed this topic in the design meeting. Better names in the Navigator are welcome and using the title makes sense. Some corner cases need to be considered:

* duplicate title: extend the name by *_1..*_n
* name given by user: don't modify
* long title: cut at a sane number of characters
* no title: use the current method
* more than one title field: use the first
* master slides: ignore since modification of title is not possible

* consider Insert > Field > Slide Title, which works similarly but is not a fully qualified option

(In reply to Timur from comment #3)
> *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 107932 ***

Let's keep this ticket separate.
Comment 6 Timur 2020-10-29 09:58:52 UTC Comment hidden (obsolete)
Comment 7 Heiko Tietze 2021-05-25 11:32:12 UTC
*** Bug 129012 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Comment 8 Timur 2021-06-17 09:01:41 UTC
*** Bug 142906 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Comment 9 Timur 2021-06-17 09:05:56 UTC
Duplicate Bug 142906 confused user created Slide Title with LO Slide Title which really is Slide 1, Slide 2..unless renamed via right-click in Slide Pane. 
Added to confusion is (per English UI) Insert-Field-Slide Title which inserts field <slide-name>.
Here was given a solution: * name given by user: don't modify (which I understand as "if user creates Slide Title use that as LO Slide Title")
Slide Title could more clearly be called Slide Name.
Comment 10 Andrea 2024-03-22 20:11:27 UTC
It is equally strange that the slide name doesn't match the slide title like it would in PowerPoint. When the Impress file is exported as a PDF, those slide names become accessibility tools as bookmarks - helping to navigate the structure of the document.

If the slide names are not pulling in meaningful names (such as from the slide title), then they don't add any meaningful structure to the document itself. This relates to WCAG criteria 2.4.5. (https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG22/Techniques/pdf/PDF2)