Bug 90777 - Writer: paragraph ApplyStyle dropdown in the toolbar badly populated
Summary: Writer: paragraph ApplyStyle dropdown in the toolbar badly populated
Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME
Alias: None
Product: LibreOffice
Classification: Unclassified
Component: Writer (show other bugs)
Version:
(earliest affected)
unspecified
Hardware: Other All
: medium normal
Assignee: Not Assigned
URL:
Whiteboard:
Keywords: needsUXEval
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2015-04-22 07:06 UTC by noname0123
Modified: 2017-07-21 09:00 UTC (History)
3 users (show)

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Description noname0123 2015-04-22 07:06:38 UTC
Ideally, the ApplyStyle dropdown should be customizable or at least be able to be restricted to custom styles.

At the moment, the current implementation populates the dropdown in a seemingly random manner, which mixes up the style names in such a way that makes them effectively unusable.

It would not be a complete solution, but it would be a help if the pulldown were populated in alphabetical order. In this case I could set the names of my customised styles appropriately to cause them to be displayed at the top of the list.

The 'More Styles' selector at the bottom of the list seems to misfire completely. It certainly closes the Styles and Formats panel, if this is already open.

In my opinion the edit functionality on each style in the pulldown is inappropriate and causes problems in practical use. The pulldown is called 'Apply Styles', not 'Modify Styles'.

It would also make the pulldown slightly more usable if it only displayed the style using its font face (as in Word) and not using its size - which makes title styles just look ridiculous.
Comment 1 Buovjaga 2015-06-11 13:20:37 UTC
Clearly a question for the design team.
Comment 2 V Stuart Foote 2015-06-11 13:47:35 UTC
Hmm, I'd agree that population seems random. 

But the starting "Clear formatting" .uno action is obvious, and the ending "More Styles..." (which performs the same function as F11 -- shifting to, or opening/closing the Styles and Formatting content panel in the Sidebar).

The default paragraph style selections listed between are determined by the type of document being opened--but the exact logic is unclear. And of course that list grows as additional styles are used within the document, or as defined in a template. 

There is a programatic basis for what shows, and I'd suspect the default follows the same categorization seen if you select the "Automatic" sort of the Styles & Formatting panel, as opposed to the default "Hierarchical" listing.

Alphabetical would not necessarily be the best choice, but a better UI allowing customization of these Paragraph styles should be possible.
Comment 3 Robinson Tryon (qubit) 2016-08-25 05:39:33 UTC Comment hidden (obsolete)
Comment 4 Heiko Tietze 2017-07-21 09:00:10 UTC
Like Stuart the current implementation works for me. You not only have the toolbar dropdwon but also the sidebar deck, a separate main menu, and soon also the context menu. The font size must not be a problem if your styles are defined reasonably. And there is an upper limit. 

Where I agree with you is to not have additional function in the dropdown selection (edit and update). But most likely there is no consent when it comes to remove a function for cleaning up the UI. And actually it's not a big deal to ignore those gimmicks. => WFM