RE: Icon love

["Joaquin Cuenca Abela" <cuenca pacaterie u-psud fr>]

Xavier wrote:
> On Fri, 2002-01-18 at 15:44, Tuomas Kuosmanen wrote:
> > On Fri, 2002-01-18 at 10:47, Carlos Perelló Marín wrote:
> >
> >     What will be really good is if you could do (or let us the
source to
> do
> >     it) the l10n of text bold, text italic and text underline, for
> example,
> >     in spanish should be "N" (bold), "I" (italic) and "S"
(underline)
> >
> >     I suppose that we should modify the applications to be able to
use a
> >     icon depending on our locale...
> >
> > Please don't.
> >
> > For once, I havent seen this on any other program. Also, B, I, U are
> > rather clear since there is also the visual cue. It could be a lot
> > harder, especially if a some language happens to map the stuff the
other
> > way around (word for "underline" would begin with "b" for example) -
it
> > would be very confusing.
> >
> > I am worried this could lead to just over-engineering and it
probably is
> > not worth the effort. If something, we could use A, A, A then.
> > (Depending on your mailer program, you might not see the example,
but
> > the idea was to use a bolded A, italic A and underlined A)
> 
> Yep. I would prefer having the same letter. I remember wondering why
> B,I,U the first time I saw them (years ago). It would have been way
> clearer if they were all the same letter.

I've come a bit late to this discussion, but I want to point out that
the BIU option has a big advantage over the AAA option.

It remembers you the keyboard shortcuts for these options (Ctrl-B,
Ctrl-I, Ctrl-U)... you know, "normal" people doesn't happen to remember
easily keyboard shortcuts, and it's always nice to give them a *very*
clear visual clue to the shortkeys of the top tree most used formatting
options in an word processor (a tooltip is far *far* less visible).

Cheers,

--
Joaquín Cuenca Abela
cuenca pacaterie u-psud fr