https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=165507
--- Comment #18 from Eyal Rozenberg <[email protected]> --- (In reply to Jonathan Clark from comment #13) > In your suggestion, what would happen to the Align Start and Align End > buttons when you switch between LTR and RTL contexts? Would they swap places > on the toolbar somehow? Or would the icons only mirror? Neglected to answer this. I'll first say that, regardless of how we place the 4 icons, we should add a direction indication to some or all of them. We already have some sort of direction indication in icons - for the bulleted and numbered lists, and for the increase and decrease indent, and even for the line spacing icons, which flip (albeit not always correctly) when we're in an RTL paragraph. The direction indication I suggest here will reflect the paragraph direction (or - will not be present for multi-direction selections); and I suggest we use a filled arrow or triangle, that indicates the direction of text, and is place at the start of the first line shown in the icon. So, a similar idea to these: https://github.com/eyalroz/bidimailui/blob/master/src/chrome/skin/classic/light/ltr-main-bar-24x24.png and these: https://github.com/eyalroz/bidimailui/blob/master/src/chrome/skin/classic/light/rtl-main-bar-24x24.png but more in line with the actual LO icon theme. This would help the user interpret the button meaning. It would also help in one of two ways: * If we only decorate Align Start and End with direction indication - it would help distinguish Align Start from Align Left for LTR paragraphs and from Align Right for RTL paragraphs (and similarly for Align Left). * If we decorate all 6 buttons - it would help the user better understand what the alignment will mean in terms of where the text will progress from, and to where. Now back to the actual question. When I got down to writing this answer, I was sure I was going to say "let the button positions be flipped on direction change", i.e. for LTR, the buttons would be: [Start] [ Center ] [ End ] [Justify] |>---- |>-- |>---- |>------ ------- -------- ------- -------- ----- ------ ----- -------- --- ---- --- -------- and in RTL, they would be: [ End ] [ Center ] [ Start ] [Justify] ----<| --<| ----<| ------<| ------- -------- ------- -------- ----- ------ ----- -------- --- ---- --- -------- but I have to admit that this suffers from similar issues to those I criticized Shai's suggestion for: * Currently, I don't know that we have the capability of rearranging the toolbar on direction change. It's not as hard as having commands-with-changing-semantics, but still. * Not clear what to do with paragraphs with differing directions. and there's another point: Even now, the 4 direction buttons are not "in order": Justify has no "correct" place among Left-Center-Right. So why should we even insist on a visual ordering of Left-Center right? That's why it may be the opposite answer that this the better alternative: * Never switch places * Drop pretense of a visual order among the alignments. In this alternative, we will always have: [Start] [ End ] [ Center ] [Justify] |>---- |>---- |>--- |>------ ------- -------- ------- -------- ----- ------ ----- -------- --- ---- --- -------- in LTR and [Start] [ End ] [ Center ] [Justify] ----<| ----<| ---<| ------<| ------- -------- ------- -------- ----- ------ ----- -------- --- ---- --- -------- in RTL. ----- Finally - I think perhaps we should to prepare some sort of comparison table between the 3 or 4 different suggestions we've collected, and add it as an attachment. Since we now have lots of intertwined comments. -- You are receiving this mail because: You are on the CC list for the bug.
