Hi :) I can totally agree with both points of view. I think select and de-select are probably easier to understand for more users although it is good to know why i felt uncomfortable about it! Enabled as the opposite of disabled is more uncomfortable politically since people in wheelchairs (a growing segment of society) are often said to be "disabled" despite the fact that there might only be a very limited number of things they can't do so well and many others they may do better. So, for a lot of office users the words might be uncomfortable. Select and de-select are safe even if i do still shudder a bit when de-select is used.
Generally it is better to stick with a word that is used a lot in documentation even if it is blatantly wrong or used badly but consistently. Flagging it up by emailing the list but not changing the documentation is the best way of handling that sort of thing. My pet hate is the use of , before "and" or "but". It is bad English but good American so i have to try to stop myself from correcting it if i ever get around to doing any work. Oddly i prefer lower-case i to distinguish it from 1 or l and because i think it look friendlier despite it being wrong. Regards from Tom :) ________________________________ From: Jean Hollis Weber <jeanwe...@gmail.com> To: documentation@libreoffice.org Sent: Wed, 16 February, 2011 8:54:05 Subject: Re: [libreoffice-documentation] Terminology: "selecting" is not enough! On Tue, 2011-02-15 at 23:59 -0800, JDługosz wrote: > I noticed in the chapters I'm working on that often various things, such as > all the items on the various pages of the Options dialog, it refers to > "selecting" an option. In one place it was more noticeable in the user was > directed to "select" something in the dialog. > > In that case, the terminology is clearly wrong. Selecting is not the same > as operating on the widget. Selecting directs the attention to it, and > another operation may then be performed, such as toggling a check box. > > I suppose in some context where the option itself is referred to in an > imperative sense, saying the option is selected is OK and in fact I didn't > notice initially. But you'd have to be careful about the wording of the > sentence: are you being imperative or directing the user's action? It's > more consistent and easier to just use a word that always works. To that > end, I'm changing whatever descriptive phrase was used to "enabled" > (antonym: "disabled"). That works for any type of control (check box, radio > box, combo-box). > > I'm also trying to be more careful about wording things to reflect the > desired state, rather than the action. I.e. clicking on an option doesn't > necessarily enable it: it will toggle it, and you shouldn't click on it > unless it was off before. So don't (just) direct the user to click on > something to achieve an effect. Rather, the effect occurs when the option > is enabled. And of course this is the very case in which merely selecting > it doesn't do anything other than make the gui draw a selection rectangle > around that item. From a programmer's POV, that's what "select" does. However, from an ordinary USER's POV, "select" turns it on and "deselect" turns it off. --Jean -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to documentation+h...@libreoffice.org List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/www/documentation/ *** All posts to this list are publicly archived for eternity *** -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to documentation+h...@libreoffice.org List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/www/documentation/ *** All posts to this list are publicly archived for eternity ***
