On Fri, Jan 12, 2001 at 03:33:11PM +0000, John Levon wrote:
>
> The blue select thus loses almost all meaning in terms of visual
> feedback. It is often quite unclear what will actually be affected by what
> operations. Furthermore, the tabular dialog is particularly confusing -
> each tab treats the selection differently. I myself have been surprised by
> its behaviour more than once.
>
Well we could disable elements which are useless for a certain selection
(as first measure).
> The solution is to add some handles to the tables. Think spreadsheet - we
> will have little grey boxes around the top and the left of the
> table[1]. Now to apply rows property changes, we can select the row box,
> and immediately get sensible blue-select feedback. We can select a number
> of rows, and apply changes to them. Right-clicking can bring up a separate
> dialog for rows only - the confusion is gone. The multicolumn "impossible
> operation" message can be avoided.
>
Seems nice and who is coding it? #:O)
Seriously I think that it shouldn't be too difficult to do this, but there
is first some other stuff I would like to fix, but this surely will go to
my todo list.
> Later on, sorting by column, and switching/moving columns and rows will
> have a simple and obvious interface.
>
Sure! While I think we will never (well in a long time ;) have support for
moving columns by mouse, but Cut/Copy/Paste operations for whole columsn
rows are quite easily possible IMO.
> Juergen, what do you think ? I think something like this is really
> necessary before table interaction will stop being painful [2]
>
I think that the idea is good, but there is some other work to do before
we can realize this.
> [1] not sure how this would work with nested tables
>
This should work as tabulars are modular insets and any of them is responsible
to draw itself on a certain position.
> [2] context-sensitive right-click stuff is generally frowned upon in the
> UI community, but it seems a reasonable compromise here
Well IMO the rightclick should be on the row/column borders and so it is
not context sensitive, but position-sensitive.
Jürgen
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Dr. Jürgen Vigna E-Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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