Bug 158291 - The term "Field Shadings" is confusing
Summary: The term "Field Shadings" is confusing
Status: RESOLVED NOTABUG
Alias: None
Product: LibreOffice
Classification: Unclassified
Component: UI (show other bugs)
Version:
(earliest affected)
unspecified
Hardware: All All
: medium minor
Assignee: Not Assigned
URL:
Whiteboard:
Keywords: needsUXEval
Depends on:
Blocks: UNO-Command-Label
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Reported: 2023-11-20 20:48 UTC by Tuomas Hietala
Modified: 2023-12-07 08:35 UTC (History)
3 users (show)

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Crash report or crash signature:


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Description Tuomas Hietala 2023-11-20 20:48:25 UTC
Description:
There's a menu item in Writer called "Field Shadings", which is described here:
https://help.libreoffice.org/latest/en-US/text/swriter/01/03080000.html

However, the term "field shadings" is somewhat confusing. Things like soft hyphens are not AFAIK generally called "fields" (in LO or elsewhere). "Shadings" is also not a term that's used elsewhere in LO. This kind of functionality is usually called "highlighting", or recently, "spotlighting", in LO.

Changing the name to "Spotlight Fields" would fix half of the problem, but ideally "Fields" would also be replaced with something more descriptive.

There's also "Index and table shadings", but I don't know what that does (it's not described in Help).


Steps to Reproduce:
1. In Writer, see View -> Field Shadings
2. See also https://translations.documentfoundation.org/search/libo_ui-master/-/en/?q=shadings&sort_by=-priority%2Cposition&checksum=

Actual Results:
A confusing term is used.

Expected Results:
A more descriptive term is used.


Reproducible: Always


User Profile Reset: No

Additional Info:
n/a
Comment 1 kdub 2023-11-22 14:22:58 UTC
Hey Tuomas,

Thanks for the suggestion.

I have attached the UI/UX team for consideration on this.
Comment 2 Heiko Tietze 2023-11-23 09:18:38 UTC
Some effort has been made to show distinguish fields from non-printable characters, see bug 58434. Might need further actions. Goal is to distinguish fields from other special text. However, is a non-breaking space really not a field? I suggest to discuss this in extra tickets.

Renaming "Field Shading" to "Spotlight Fields" sounds okay to me but I'm afraid this ends up in calling all those functions "spotlight". Which is a lot of effort for not much benefit.
Comment 3 Adolfo Jayme Barrientos 2023-11-23 09:49:23 UTC
"Indicators"?
Comment 4 Cor Nouws 2023-12-06 18:35:03 UTC
Hi Tuomas,
(In reply to Tuomas Hietala from comment #0)
> There's also "Index and table shadings", but I don't know what that does
> (it's not described in Help).
The background of an index (TOC or other) can have an accent, a 'shading', similar to that of fields. 
Cheers- Cor
Comment 5 Eyal Rozenberg 2023-12-06 22:29:21 UTC
Personally, I'm ok with Field Shading. It's intuitive enough IMHO, plus the fact that this term isn't widely used means I don't confuse it with terms for other kind of styling or transformations.
Comment 6 Heiko Tietze 2023-12-07 08:33:07 UTC
We discussed the topic in the design meeting.

Some ideas have been discussed here, Field Highlighting could be another option. However, the term shading is known in MSO (Character Shading) and we think the effort does not justify the benefit. Neither the need to learn a different word for users. => NAB