The AutoCorrect options, accessible on the menus through Tools > AutoCorrect > AutoCorrect Options... , and then choosing the Options tab - are IMHO a jumbled mess that is very difficult to understand: * There is no sub-categorization of the ~20 items, while * Some are corrections, some change content between two valid choices, some don't change content at all * Some apply new formatting, some alter formatting, some don't format at all. * Some changes are paragraph-level, some are character-level, some are multi-paragraph * For most items, it is not indicated what replaces what. Examples: * "Create Table" - when? Out of what? ; * "Replace dashes" - which dashes get replaced? What are they replaced with? * "Use replacement table" - to replace what? And what's in the table? * Many items are just generally confusing * "Ignore double spaces" - how is that different from not ignoring them? * "Apply border" - Border of what? Apply it to what? When? * "DOI citation recognition" - Writer doesn't even have citation management; what's this even supposed to do? (Hint: it doesn't actually recognize DOI numbers...) I believe we should both reorgnize this pane somewhat, and do some careful renaming.
Duplicate of bug 158877, or vice versa. At least partially. While some options might be not easy to understand I think the alternative is worse. You just have to look into the help if you don't have a clue might be changed into a table (and you probably wont look into this dialog anyway). The alternative could be some illustration with the drawback that you scroll through a huge dialog. Categorization is likely to fail in may cases; let's say one would be Styles and the question is whether DF with *bold* is a styling or not. In the end I see no immediate issue with the dialog. Do you have support for your view?
(In reply to Heiko Tietze from comment #1) > Duplicate of bug 158877, or vice versa. At least partially. Let's say this one depends on that one. i.e. if 158877 was resolved somehow, that would reduce the severity of the general problem I complain about here. > While some options might be not easy to understand I think the alternative > is worse. But there isn't such as thing as _the_ alternative. There's a design space of the UI for these different options, plus the text labels of labels in each point of that design space. A specific example: If we separated content-changing options, and displayed them so as to indicate and differentiate what gets replaced and with what - that will certainly be an improvement, almost regardless of what phrasing we choose. > The alternative could be some illustration with the drawback that you scroll > through a huge dialog. Illustrations are one option of several. And even if we consider illustrations/examples - those could be per-setting collapsible (and collapsed by default); or visible only in a tooltip. > In the end I see no immediate issue with the dialog. Do you have support for > your view? Like most bugs I file, not at this time, but I'm sure there would be. I'll try to get some sock puppets, but even without them, you're dismissing this too quickly...
I agree that some of the options are not easy to understand. I think renaming options which consideration what gets replaced by what is a great way for potential improvement. I do not want to exclude that there might be a better UI but for now I do not have ideas that would clearly improve it without strong drawbacks.
Created attachment 192160 [details] The autocorrect options dialog The Tools|AutoCorrect|AutoCorrect Options dialog, Options pane, of LO Writer 7.6.4.1
Heiko, given what Jan says, how about the following concrete suggestions: 1. Separate the list into two lists, one for textual replacements/corrections, and one for formatting/structural element introduction (if you believe a third category is appropriate, let's do that). 2. Change phrasing for textual replacement items to clarify what is replaced with what. Example "Replace dashes" could become "Replace dash sequence with En-Dash or Em-Dash" 3. Improve descriptions of structural element introduction items. e.g. "Bulleted and numbered lists" - what about them? Even this is an improvement: "Recognize bulleted or numbered paragraphs" and we could also split the two kinds and have "Recognize bulleted paragraph by bullet symbol at paragraph start" and "Recognize numbered paragraph by a number and delimiter at paragraph start" or something along those lines. 4. (Maybe) Add a longer explanation in a tooltip. That's a rather conservative change IMHO.
We discussed the topic in the design meeting. Separating the list is very subjective and one may have a concept of replacement vs. formatting while others would make a different distinction. Therefore this idea was rejected. Renaming some entries make sense, however, even when the (online) help is still needed. Before any patch could be done we need to complete the list of changes.