Re: My (ongoing) analysis of the proposed modules

[Noah Levitt <nlevitt columbia edu>]

On Sat, May 10, 2003 at  8:00:00 +1000, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> 
> Yeah, this makes sense. Perhaps it would be better to use terminology that
> within the problem domain: "Increase/Decrease font size"?

I called it that originally, but I thought Zoom would make
more sense to users. It means exactly the same thing that it
means in mozilla/galeon/epiphany, after all.

> 
> > > [Zoom Mode]
> 
> Ah, I see. I guess I would prefer hold-left-and-pop-up and a keyboard
> shortcut, rather than a mode. But that's just me More UI review stuff here.
> :-)

That makes good sense. But if I do that, how do users find
out about it?

> 
> I guess I will ask the innocent user question: When would I need to do this,
> and what does "to the power of two" mean?

I don't know if I can explain when or why you would want to
do this. For people who know about unicode, it just makes
sense. This bug report and conversation might shed some
light. As you can see, I resisted the request. But at some
point, I realized that it was trivial to implement, so I did
it.

  http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=107965

  23:55 < roozbeh> noah: ok then, the biggest feature request, is having some feature to make the number of cells in a row a power of 2.
  23:56 < noah> roozbeh: can you explain more how it would work?
  23:56 < noah> roozbeh: "snap to power of two" mode or something?
  23:57 < roozbeh> noah: yep, and as a default.
  23:57 < noah> roozbeh: why? :)
  23:57 < roozbeh> noah: when i maximize, i see 21 cells in a row. that's just insane for a unicode mindset! :))
  23:57 < roozbeh> because characters have that sense of order in them.
  23:57 < roozbeh> 16 is a magic number.
  23:58 < roozbeh> block boundaries all happen in numbers divisible by 16.
  23:58 < noah> roozbeh: only for people who know unicode
  23:58 < roozbeh> from small A to capital A, there are 32 chars,
  23:58 < roozbeh> noah: you are exposing unicode.
  23:58 < roozbeh> same from small alpha to capital alpha,
  23:58 < roozbeh> and for cyrillic.
  23:58 < noah> roozbeh: and you can always resize your window / resize your font so you have however many cols you want
  23:59 < roozbeh> noah: sure. just a feature request, of course. fontlab has it.
  23:59 < noah> roozbeh: does fontlab have an option _not_ to snap to a power of two?
  23:59 < roozbeh> noah: and the thing that new scripts start at random places in the right-side table is a little scary.
  --- Day changed Mon Mar 10 2003
  00:00 < roozbeh> noah: yep.
  00:00 < roozbeh> noah: the default is not to snap there.
  00:00 < noah> roozbeh: ok. if i add this feature, i don't think i will make it the default
  00:00 < noah> roozbeh: i am used to character maps that do use 16 columns
  00:01 < noah> roozbeh: but at this point, the fact that it looks good at any size is more important to me

Noah