[Fwd: ODF 1.2: Data Label Positions]

[Lars Oppermann <Lars.Oppermann@Sun.COM>]

Hi,

Following are some additions regarding the data label auto positions 
from the developers of the openoffice.org chart module...

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: ODF 1.2: Data Label Positions
Date: Wed, 10 Oct 2007 14:50:16 +0200
From: Ingrid Halama <Ingrid.Halama@Sun.COM>
To: Lars Oppermann <Lars.Oppermann@Sun.COM>
CC: Bjoern Milcke <Bjoern.Milcke@Sun.COM>, Ingrid Halama 
<Ingrid.Halama@Sun.COM>

Dear TC,

I recently started to implement the new Data Label Positions property
and stumbled over some problems with the current proposal. That is why I
would like to ask for following changes:

1) First I would like to mention the sentence:

'Not all chart types must support the positions inside, outside and
near-origin. In that case such a chart would jump back to auto.'

This is at least problematic for pie and donut charts, because for pie
charts I cannot imagine a meaningful way to implement north, south etc.
So I would suggest to switch back to a more general sentence:

'A chart type does not need to support all values for this property.'

I see no harm in this vagueness as it is not worse than the current
state with ODF 1.1. In ODF 1.1 we already have data labels and the
placement is completely undefined and implementation dependent.

2) With the value 'auto' there is a confusion between default value and
best fit algorithm. I would suggest to rename 'auto' to 'avoid-overlap'
to state more precisely what this was meant to do. The picture for pies
already did show this but the text introduced some confusion.

3) To be more compatible with version ODF 1.1, the absence of the
attribute should have the same meaning as before. That is the labels are
placed implementation dependent. In case of OOo (and I guess in all
implementations of ODF) the placement was chart type dependent.

4) Finally I rephrased the first two sentences to one new sentence.
(Just wording)

I attached the proposal including my suggested changes. I activated
change tracking thus you can directly see the changes if you like.

5) There is one additional thing I didn't change but stumbled over while
implementing. I recognized that this is the very first place where we
use geographic directions (north, south, east etc.) to indicate a
position. This does not really harm but it looks somehow inconsistent to
me. So maybe we should change this too to use the standard values left,
right, top etc. ?

Thanks,
Ingrid

ChartDataLabelAutoPosition_iha.odt