In the Paragraph Style dialog as well as the Drawing Style dialog, we see a preview-mockup in the corner of the dialog tab involving direction and alignment. The mockup contains several gray bars representing a paragraph and its surrounding paragraphs. While the mockup indicates the alignment well enough, it does not indicate the choice of direction in any way. I believe we should consider introducing some visual indication of the direction. Without getting into the specific bikeshedding of what indication that would be exactly, I believe it should be possible for it to be both easy-to-understand while also not interfering with the each of understand what the alignment would look like. Perhaps something involving arrows/directed triangles on top of the bars, at the beginning, on all bars or just the first one; or replacing the beginning edge of the first bar, e.g., very roughly: |>======== ========== ==== vs ========== ========== ==== which we have now. Thus for example right-aligned LTR-text would look like this: --------- --------- --------- ======<| ========= ==== --------- --------- --------- while right-aligned RTL-text would look like this: --------- --------- --------- =====<| ======== ==== --------- --------- ---------
Created attachment 199416 [details] Screenshot Pretty clear what left/right means. And if you have the text direction in mind, it should be "Use superordinate object settings" and we don't know what this is. Switching explicitly to LTR or RTL should not be required and used much, and drawing an indicator in those rare cases does not justify the effort, IMO.
(In reply to Heiko Tietze from comment #1) > Pretty clear what left/right means. That's _alignment_, not direction. It's not clear where the text starts and in which direction it progresses. > And if you have the text direction in > mind, it should be "Use superordinate object settings" and we don't know > what this is. No, it shouldn't - unless the direction of the entire page is uniform. That is sometimes the case, and sometimes - not. When it isn't, it is typically Paragraph Styles which set another direction. (It may also be Drawing Object Styles, but we don't have those in Writer yet.) > Switching explicitly to LTR or RTL should not be required and > used much When you're writing documents involving text in both RTL and LTR languages, this is required for some of the styles. > and drawing an indicator in those rare cases does not justify the > effort, IMO. They are not rare at all. Middle-Easterners write a lot of English and some French, East-Asians write a lot of English, and Africans write a lot of French. And when doing that, documents often involve content in both directions.
We discussed the topic in the design meeting. Adding such indicator sounds reasonable and wont break UX for LTR while probably helping the RTL world. The indicator could be the pilcrow symbol, as for the superordinate setting"we may need to hide it.
(In reply to Heiko Tietze from comment #3) > The indicator could be the pilcrow symbol The pilcrow is tall and narrow, and if you make it small enough to fit along the bars in the preview, it may be difficult to make out. Also remember that in our direction buttons - the pilcrow is the same direction, and it's an arrow that indicates the direction. So, can you make this suggestion more concrete? > as for the superordinate setting"we may need to hide it. Hmm, I wonder what's best: * Keep it (using current inherited value) * Hide it * Modify it to indicate inheritance + the current inherited value I'm fine with hiding it for now, as it requires less work, although I'm not 100% sure that's the best choice.