Suppose you have a box in Impress, and you want to modify the spacing between its borders and its internal text area (a.k.a. its "padding"). You can do this via the content menu > Text Attributes > Text. This is already not so great, as it's not really an "attribute of the text", but of the box. That's the minor issue. The major issue is that it's very difficult, or impossible, to get to these settings from anywhere else: * It's not on the main toolbar * It's not on the text formatting toolbar (and even if it were, the infernal app closes that on you as soon as you exist text editing mode) * It's not in the Format menu * Specifically, it's not in Format > Text, if you were somehow optimistic about menu hierarchy consistency... * It's not in any section of the properties sidebar - and you'll waste quite a bit of time looking for it in "Area" and "Position and Size" maybe. WTF?! That makes no sense at all.
Context menu: Text Attributes... Main menu: Format > Object and Shape > Text Attributes... and at some of the Notebookbar variants If you have the (classic) toolbar in mind I disagree that all commands need to be present all the time. What else?
(In reply to Heiko Tietze from comment #1) > If you have the (classic) toolbar in mind I disagree that all commands need > to be present all the time. What else? I somehow "misplaced" it in the main toolbar. So, I take back the claim that it's missing. Still, I feel it doesn't stand out. Line spacing has its own submenu, and so does "a bunch of actual text properties", bullets and numbering has 2 top-level main menu items (a submenu and an item for opening the dialog) - and all those are very well represented on the toolbars. Plus, we have two menu top-level items for "Name" and "Description" (Why are those not together, by the way? and Why is there both a title and a name?). But the padding is relegated to an ambiguously relegated tab in a dialog on a submenu? Not fair. The other claims stand; especially this being absent from the side-bar. About the toolbars - if this was better available otherwise, adding this to the main toolbar is not necessary, and the text formatting toolbar is not quite quite the right place, so not sure about that.
Some of the options in the Text dialog (right-click the text inside the shape and go to "Text attributes" could be on its own section in the Properties sidebar. The section could be named "Text Attributes" and we could have: - Spacing to borders - Wrap and resize options - Number of columns and spacing between columns - Effect (maybe)
(In reply to Rafael Lima from comment #3) Are we talking about Impress only, or also Draw? Also, following the design meeting today, it seems like this should be confirmed as NEW.
(In reply to Eyal Rozenberg from comment #4) > Are we talking about Impress only, or also Draw? Since the Text dialog is identical both in Draw and Impress, these improvements to the Properties sidebar should be implemented for both applications.
Yes, this topic has been discussed in the design meeting. We have a deck "Columns" in the sidebar, which is part of the text attributes. So the recommendation is to rename this deck into "Text" (or "Text Attributes"), add the "Fit height/width" options, and provide full access to the properties via the deck master interaction (top-right button). Some code pointers svx/uiconfig/ui/sidebartextcolumnspanel.ui svx/source/sidebar/textcolumns/TextColumnsPropertyPanel.cxx