217523 - font preference UI behavior inefficient - changing multiple encodings

Status: NEW

(SeaMonkey :: Preferences, defect)

Description

[Daniel B.]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/4.79 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.4.18+dsb+smp+ide i686)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.5a) Gecko/20030718

The UI design/form fonts preferences is inefficient--changing the settings
for multiple encodings requires opening the preferences window multiple times.

After changing a setting (e.g., the size in pixels), to apply the change the
user (apparently) must click on the OK button, which also closes the 
preferences window.  Changing the settings for encoding A and then 
selecting a different encoding B discards the changes for the encoding A.


Note all the steps the user has to perform to get back to the Font pane
to select another encoding whose settings to change:

0. (Click the Preferences window's OK button.)
1.  Shift attention and mouse location back to the main window.
2.  Click/mouse-down on the View menu button.
3.  Drag/move within the View menu.
4.  Click/release on the Preferences menu item.
5.  Shift to the re-displayed Preferences window.
6.  Click on the Appearance tree node.
7.  Click on the Fonts tree node.
8.  Shift over to the encoding selection control.

This could be reduced to one or two steps:

1.  Click on a new Apply button, which would apply the changes.
2.  Shift up to the encoding selection control.

or
      
1.  Shift up to the encoding selection control, if selecting a different
    encoding didn't discard the settings for the previously selected
    encoding.






Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
To see discarding of one encoding's settings.

1.  Get to the Fonts pane.
2.  For some encoding, change the "Size (pixel)" setting.
3.  Select a different encoding.
4.  Switch back to the original encoding.
5.  Note that the size setting in the original value, not the changed value.

To see inconvenience of UI, change settings for two different encodings
(note repetition of the 8 steps listed above).

Comment 1

[Daniel B.]

I wrote:
> The UI design/form fonts...

I meant:  The UI design/behavior for fonts...

Comment 2

[Bernard Alleysson]

confirming windows 2003 mozilla 1.5b
this is probably a dupe

Comment 3

[Bernard Alleysson]

*** Bug 217526 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 4

[Thomas Harold]

(In reply to comment #2)
> confirming windows 2003 mozilla 1.5b
> this is probably a dupe

Still broken in Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7)
Gecko/20040616.

The UI either needs to automatically save the settings when you switch to a
different encoding or provide an apply button that doesn't close the options
dialog.  Changing font settings for more then a handful of encodings is
extremely tedious unless you resort to editing the prefs.js file directly.

Comment 5

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

The basic problem of this bug apparently is not "inefficiency" -- in point of 
fact, if you make changes on one encoding page, switch to another, make changes 
there, and *do not* return to the initial one, all changes will be saved.

Returning to a page where changes have been made, before clicking OK to accept 
the changes made on all pages so far, discards the changes on that page.

FF bug 233769.

As for efficiency: I would really like to be able to have a single change 
applied to several, or all, encodings.  For instance, the font sizes -- I don't 
want to have to go to Western, Unicode, Central, Baltic and Cyrillic pages just 
to make the same size changes across the board.  But it's a tough problem to 
design the UI for that...

Comment 6

[Felix Miata]

Maybe a UI could be easy enough by using a hidden preference on by default to have any size change made in any charset apply to every charset. Those who actually need different charsets different sizes could switch the pref off through about:config and they have the currently existing behavior.

KDE settings panels all have an "apply" button. I think that approach would get this problem solved. 

Comment 7

[Fan Decheng]

*** Bug 331059 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 8

[Serge Gautherie (:sgautherie)]

(Filter "spam" on 'prefs-nobody-20080612'.)