Clicking on a character in the table appends it to the string to be inserted, so it is easy to add an unwanted character. However, the 'delete' button deletes the whole string, which is not only unintuitive, but also frustrating, because most of the time one just wants to undo the last addition, and not to restart from the beginning.
Please provide numerated detailed steps on how to reproduce, even if it seems simple to you, for triaging purposes we need the steps in order to see exactly what you see. Marking as NEEDINFO, once you provide the steps mark as UNCONFIRMED and we will triage the bug :) Thanks for your understanding and help
Steps to reproduce: 1. Insert/Special character... 2. Click on any character in the table on the left: this will print the clicked character below the table, right after the label 'Characters:' 3. Repeat step 2 a few times: the clicked characters are printed below the table, each after the previously clicked character (Now if you click on the button labeled as 'OK', all of the characters gathered in steps 2 and 3 are inserted at the cursor position in the document) 4. Click on the button labeled as 'Delete' in the bottom right corner: it deletes all the characters gathered so far 5. You realize you cannot undo step 4, and perform something like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=wFnCYgoYvBA#t=22s Why is the current behavior wrong? Because gathering characters from the semi-ordered table can be very time-consuming and/or frustrating. When you are looking for 4 special characters, found 3 of them, then accidentally clicked on something you don't want, and you try to remove it, you can start the whole process again from the beginning. This kills the whole feature of inserting more than one special character at once. I see two possible solutions: 1. The 'Delete' button is renamed to 'Delete all' 2. The 'Delete' button only removes the last character of the string (preferred) Is this detailed enough?
Will attempt to reproduce :)
Andras Timar committed a patch related to this issue. It has been pushed to "master": http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/commit/?id=ab7776e1bc0687b6e42ffa6e837435800b4a58af fdo#63503 add 'Delete Last' button to Special Characters dialog The patch should be included in the daily builds available at http://dev-builds.libreoffice.org/daily/ in the next 24-48 hours. More information about daily builds can be found at: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Testing_Daily_Builds Affected users are encouraged to test the fix and report feedback.
To make things simpler, why not remove both “Delete” and the newly added “Delete All” and make the “Character” label a text box? That way, UI is simplified and the user can delete characters one by one with the Backspace key or the Delete key.
(In reply to comment #5) > To make things simpler, why not remove both “Delete” and the newly added > “Delete All” and make the “Character” label a text box? That way, UI is > simplified and the user can delete characters one by one with the Backspace > key or the Delete key. Yes, please.
UI font not necessarily contains the required glyph, simple Edit box is not good for that purpose. We would need a rich text edit box. Feel free to open a new bug and/or hack on this, it is an easy hack.
Thanks a bunch András for replying, I’ve now submitted my suggestion as bug #64302 and will attempt to hack on it :-)