[Fwd: Re: [Fwd: [office] Proposal: layer-set per page]]

[Michael Brauer - Sun Germany - ham02 - Hamburg <Michael.Brauer@Sun.COM>]

Hi David,
Hi all,

please find below Christian Lippka's comment regarding layer-sets per page.

Best regards

Michael

BTW: Christian is an OOo Impress developer.

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [Fwd: [office] Proposal: layer-set per page]
Date: Mon, 09 Jul 2007 14:37:12 +0200
From: Christian Lippka - Sun Microsystems GmbH - Hamburg 
<Christian.Lippka@Sun.COM>
To: Michael Brauer - Sun Germany - ham02 - Hamburg <Michael.Brauer@Sun.COM>
CC: Armin Le Grand <Armin.Le.Grand@Sun.COM>
References: <468DD64C.6010006@sun.com>

having individual layers for pages in a drawing document makes perfectly
sense as a feature.

If I read your proposal correct you want to keep the document wide
layers and add
optional layers per page. I think this only complicates things. Take
your example that
when you delete a layer only the shapes that are on that layer on the
current slides
are deleted. This will only happen if the deleted layer is in fact a
layer that is local
to the current slide. Deleting a document wide layer will still cause
all shapes to be
deleted. I think this is a source of major confusion for the users.
Also I'm not a fan of user interface dialogs like "do you want to add
that layer
to the current page only or to the document Yes/No/What?"

So my opinion to this proposal is to either define that the page layer
completely override the document wide layer or better to define
that a document can have either only document wide layer or
page layer.

Having only page layer and maybe deprecating document wide layer would
allow us to add two other nice enhancements.

1) Layer in other drawing applications always also influence the paint order
of the shapes.
Therefore if you move one layer behind another layer, you also move the
shapes
from that layer behind the shapes of the other layer. If we deprecate
the old
document wide layer we could define this behavior for the page layer and
avoid
compatibility issues with old documents.
By adding this paint order feature to the layers, one must thing how to
handle
group shapes. Does it make sense that shapes inside group shapes can
have individual layers? Or should only the group shapes on page level have
layers and all shapes inside would be forced to the layer of the top
group shape?
Personally I think only the later makes sense and could be implemented
without
making this feature to complicated for the end user.

2) Layer settings are currently application view settings
In OpenOffice.org a layer can be visible or hidden, printable or non
printable and
locked or non locked. These are implemented as view settings and therefore
stored like the other settings as generic and undocumented data.
OOo supports these settings individual for each open view. This may make
sense
for the visibility flag, so you want a layer visible in one view and not
visible in
the next. But that does not make much sense for printing and lock. Those
attributes are definitely document settings.
And even for the visibility the current feature is flawed as OOo only
saves one
view, so the per view information is lost.
Therefore I would suggest to also add these three layer properties directly
to the page layer in the document and making them therefore document
settings.


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-- 
Michael Brauer, Technical Architect Software Engineering
StarOffice/OpenOffice.org
Sun Microsystems GmbH             Nagelsweg 55
D-20097 Hamburg, Germany          michael.brauer@sun.com
http://sun.com/staroffice         +49 40 23646 500
http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS

Sitz der Gesellschaft: Sun Microsystems GmbH, Sonnenallee 1,
	   D-85551 Kirchheim-Heimstetten
Amtsgericht Muenchen: HRB 161028
Geschaeftsfuehrer: Wolfgang Engels, Dr. Roland Boemer
Vorsitzender des Aufsichtsrates: Martin Haering