Created attachment 61727 [details]
a fix

the current ruler behavior in impress is consistent to writer and can be
considered a fix to pre OOo 3.0 versions. It is a new and documented feature of
OOo 3.0 that bullet and paragraph indents are now independent, like in writer
and like specified in odf.

The triangles in the ruler are there to change the indents of the selected
paragraphs, not to change the bullets.

By the way, the supplied patch shredders the users document if he selects more
than one paragraph...

closing

> the current ruler behavior in impress is consistent to writer 
>
Nope. Just try higher outline levels, and you'll notice the difference. Given
the fact that the ruler even paints a little vertical helper line, this is
totally broken.

> and can be considered a fix to pre OOo 3.0 versions.
>
Yeah, right. The ruler behaviour was soo totally broken before.

> It is a new and documented feature of OOo 3.0 that bullet and paragraph 
> indents are now independent, like in writer and like specified in odf.
>
What does that have to do with ruler behaviour?

> The triangles in the ruler are there to change the indents of the selected
> paragraphs, not to change the bullets.
>
That's spec-ed where? It was *not* like that in <3.0 Impress (and, case in
point, in PPT). And it's complete nonsense, usability-wise, to have it work like
that, just because the implementation suggests doing it. No-one in his right
mind changes first line indents in Impress - because afterwards the text looks
like shit. The only sensible thing to change is the bullet/text distance, and
otherwise keep the left indents flushed.

> By the way, the supplied patch shredders the users document if he selects 
> more than one paragraph...
>
Oh? Not here - what exactly did you do, and what do you mean by "shreddered"?

The ruler is about changing the paragraph indent, not the bullet, as it is in
writer, as it is in calc.

Powerpoint has no such feature as bullets, it emulates bullets by using the
paragraph indention (and some other tricks). Impress since 3.0 uses bullets as
specified by ODF and does not use any hacks.

> "No-one in his right
mind changes first line indents in Impress - because afterwards the text looks
like shit. The only sensible thing to change is the bullet/text distance, and
otherwise keep the left indents flushed."

So user who use first line indents in impress are "out of their minds" ? Sorry,
I don't discuss on this level. Read some books about text formatting and try to
understand why the ODF bullet feature is superior to that of PowerPoint. 

And about that patch, just imagine you select more than one paragraph and those
paragraphs have different bullets and different levels...

closing

> Just try higher outline levels, and you'll notice the difference. Given
> the fact that the ruler even paints a little vertical helper line, this is
> totally broken.
>
Christian, did you actually try this? I cannot seriously believe you keep
closing this bug as "worksforme" - it is *not* behaving the same as in Writer.

With my most obvious grudge set aside, let's move on to the details:

> The ruler is about changing the paragraph indent, not the bullet, as it is in
> writer, as it is in calc.
>
Yes. You keep saying that. And I say that it 
a) does not make sense in Impress
b) is totally different to pre-3.0 times, and to PPT

> Powerpoint has no such feature as bullets, it emulates bullets by using the
> paragraph indention (and some other tricks). Impress since 3.0 uses bullets as
> specified by ODF and does not use any hacks.
>
Again: in which way does that imply ruler behaviour? A UI controller can change
whatever internal representation it likes, the decision about what *exactly* is
one about usability, no?

> So user who use first line indents in impress are "out of their minds"?
> Sorry, I don't discuss on this level. Read some books about text formatting
> and try to understand why the ODF bullet feature is superior to that of 
> PowerPoint. 
>
Sorry for being very direct in my previous statement - I think I have a fair
understanding of text formatting concepts (but feel free to suggest additional
reading). Still, what does the superiority of the odf bullet implementation have
to do with what a specific UI controller manipulates? And going back to my
offensive statement - you are seriously saying users will more often have to
modify first line indentation, than bullet distance? That would imply most
paragraphs in Impress break up into 3 or more lines, because with 2 lines having
first line indent differ from left indent looks like shit (yes, I mean it). Even
with 3+ lines, nobody with any sense of aesthetics would use first line indent
in a bulleted paragraph - it's simply overdoing, the bullet itself is visual
clue enough for a new paragraph. Concluding, I definitely challenge your opinion
that the new ruler behaviour (ruler behaviour, not the change to the
bullet/indent implementation) is an improvement in *any* way.

> And about that patch, just imagine you select more than one paragraph and
> those paragraphs have different bullets and different levels...
>
Christian, did you actually try this?

a deeper compare with writer is currently not possible as it looks like the
writer has some serious regression with numbering since 3.1. Have to clarify
with writer team about that. 

> > And about that patch, just imagine you select more than one paragraph and
> > those paragraphs have different bullets and different levels...
> >
> Christian, did you actually try this?
Did you? multiple paragraphs selected, different indention, different bullets....

> Did you? multiple paragraphs selected, different indention, different
> bullets....
>
Yep. To be specific, that's what I did: select title/text layout, type a few
multi-line paragraphs into the outline box, each of them at a different
indentation level (which by itself ends up in different bullets used). Ctrl-A,
moved the ruler sliders. Behaviour: exactly the same as without the patch. ;)

> Yep. To be specific, that's what I did: select title/text layout, type a few
> multi-line paragraphs into the outline box, each of them at a different
> indentation level (which by itself ends up in different bullets used).

Only changing the indentation level does *not* change the bullet, that is the
whole point of the feature that our internal bullet has a *representation* for
all 10 indentation levels. This is typical symptom fixing without understanding
the root cause

However the result will be, I set a target of 3.x for this task, even if
rejected for valid reasons and agreed. Maybe you both should involve UX in this
case to get some other opinions regarding the right behaviour. I really don't
know what's the best solution for our 'usual' customer base.

FL: I just have tried the bullets behavior in Impress to understand this issue.
I just want to drop some notes:

* Manual bullet lists inside a text object do not support the Demote/Promote
buttons in the shown toolbar. They are just disabled. These buttons should be
enabled. Often increasing indent is used to 'manually' demote a bullet list as
we have seen in tests.

* Currently there is no 'Width of numbering' set for the first bullet level. So
the default bullet created within a text object has no space between bullet and
text. This looks like an error to me. Level 2-9 are set to 0,6cm by default
which looks much nicer.

Older versions of Writer did not show any indent of numberings inside the ruler
and Writer did not recognised the paragraph indent in bullet list/numberings.
This has been hanged with 2.x. Please see the following specs for details:
http://specs.openoffice.org/writer/numbering/NumberingBullet1.sxw
and http://specs.openoffice.org/writer/numbering/NewListLevelAttrs.odt

> Older versions of Writer did not show any indent of numberings inside the ruler
> and Writer did not recognised the paragraph indent in bullet list/numberings.
> This has been hanged with 2.x. Please see the following specs for details:
> http://specs.openoffice.org/writer/numbering/NumberingBullet1.sxw
> and http://specs.openoffice.org/writer/numbering/NewListLevelAttrs.odt
> 
Frank, thanks for the spec links. Unfortunately they don't mention ruler
behaviour at all, so I still maintain my position that ruler behaviour (in
Impress) was changed in 3.0 without spec (and likely without giving enough
thought on the impact this has on usability).

> Only changing the indentation level does *not* change the bullet, that is the
> whole point of the feature that our internal bullet has a *representation* for
> all 10 indentation levels. This is typical symptom fixing without understanding
> the root cause
>
@cl: Thank you. Now, would you please either give a step-by-step instruction of
what you did & what from you point of view is "shreddered" afterwards, or attach
a bugdoc? I'm apparently incapable of grasping the problem otherwise, and this
starts to be a waste of time...

- Apply patch to impress
- create new impress
- select "Title, Text" layout
- insert 3 paragraphs into the outline shape
- select all 3 paragraphs and assign a numbering

now you should have (1. xxx 2.xxx 3. xxx )

- select paragraph 2 and use the ctrl click on ruler to change indent

now you have (1. xxx 1.xxx 2.xxx)

I was still not able to get hold of a writer developer to explain me how much of
the current bullet behavior is a bug and what parts of it are considered a
feature. Anyhow this ends I still consider it an error to hard set a numbering
item just to change the paragraphs indent. For user experience I may be ok with
having the indent from the bullet added to the ui placement of the ruler
triangles, but changing only the lrspace item, not the bullet if something is
changed.

@cl: Ah! You were referring to numbering! Yep, confirming the problem now, will
cook up a fix.

Regarding the mapping of ruler indent to items - not much preference here, I
chose a simple solution that appears to work, surely the heuristic can be made
much smarter.

@thb: before you waste more of you precious time, putting a hard formatted
bullet item into a paragraph to change its indention is not an option. I'm
puzzled how you use the sacredness of the style concept in one issue to argue
against my solution but in this issue you put hard items into the paragraph for
no reason but to mimic an old behavior and because "It's the cheap way to go".

@cl: thanks for the encouraging words. I think I'll indeed go wasting my time
somewhere else...

I discussed the writer numbering behaviour with OD today. Turns out they mimic
the word behavior and they use new ODF attributes to store the different
behavior. This adds further confusion to this issue. To summarize:

ODF defined the paragraph indention and the indention from numbering additive,
so the final indention of a paragraph would be the sum of is paragraph indention
and an optional indention from a numbering indention. In impress this was used
wrongly (both paragraph and numbering indention would always have the same value
and only one of the values where used) in OOo 2.x version. I fixed this for OOo
3.0 so now the file format is correctly used and changes in paragraph indention
does not cause a hard change of the numbering item any longer.

In the meantime, the writer added a new numbering behavior in OOo 3.0 to mimic
the word numbering and adding new ODF attributes (this means in OOo 3.0 impress
uses the writer OOo 2.x format and OOo 3.0 writer uses new new format). With the
new behavior the indention from a numbering is ignored as soon as a paragraph
indention is set. From my point of view a very useless behavior as you can no
longer indent a text that contains a numbering, as all numbering levels will be
flat on the paragraph indention.

The current user interface implementation of the new behavior in writer is still
work in progress and contains some issues and inconsistency. I have asked OD to
notify/include me on further work in this area so we can work out the
inconsistency of impress and writer in the future.

Now for the changed behavior of the ruler in impress, even looking at the new
writer implementation it would still be a mistake to hard format the numbering
when changing the ruler. The only viable solution I see is to add paragraph and
numbering indention to visualize the indention knobs in the ruler and if the
user changes them, the numbering intentions will be subtracted and only the
paragraph indention will be changed. This would result in the same visual
behavior as in OOo 2.x while still not making the past mistake to put a hard
formatted bullet item in each and every paragraph that has an indention.

Changing target to 3.x and accepting issue

@cl: thx for researching the details, sounds good generally - only remaining
problem I see is the bullet/text distance, which to the best of my knowledge is
only adjustable by changing the NumBullet item's CharTextDistance (which then
leads to a hard item set again).

Created attachment 63164 [details]
improved fix

New patch - no longer needlessly changing NumBullet item - only when bullet/text
distance changes (which is unavoidable FWICT). Also fixes a nasty repaint issue,
when using numbering: changing the NumBullet item on one paragraph potentially
affects all subsequent one. OutlinerView::SetAttribs() adapted accordingly.

Reset assigne to the default "issues@openoffice.apache.org".