An improvement suggestion (+ a few more!)

Main point: easier selection of styles from style sheets would help greatly IME


I've just investigated a number of tools for maintaining some 
in-house documentation using HTML. Amaya looks a close fit for my 
needs, save for one small annoyance that if fixed would make a big 
difference to me.

I use my own style sheets and have several "standard" ones I've made 
over the years. Amaya allows users to style text by selecting a class 
from a list taken from a style sheet, with the result that the text 
is enclosed in span tags whose class attribute refers to that of the 
style class selected.

The trouble is, the Amaya form element offered is too select classes 
is far too fiddly to be practical if there are more than a handful of 
styles to chose from.

I would suggest that either a pull-down menu be used, which would 
also take up less screen space, or some alternative means of 
selecting the styles be investigated. Pull-down menus have the 
advantage to users that they can easily click-drag down long lists, 
rather than scroll to a position (which is fiddly if the window is 
small compared to the size of the list), and in some 
OSes/applications, users can type the first few letters to "jump" to 
an item.

The current select box is very clumsy to use, so much so that its 
easier to manually type in the entire span with the class field into 
the source code. This renders the ability to set styles yourself 
moot, for my use anyway.

I'm using Mac OS X (10.4.11), if that has any bearing.

If I had more time I'd see if there is some (easy!) way to hack this 
from the resources within the installed application, but I have too 
many others things to do.


While I'm writing, I also note the bug on the Apple Mac noted by 
others whereby editing the source code isn't saved until clicking on 
the preview panel (i.e. "independently reproduced" here).


Someone else suggested a "line" to help mark out the current position 
in the source code: I'd suggest instead highlighting the line by 
changing the background colour, as is done in BBEdit and 
TextWrangler. Using a line as suggested will likely interfere with 
lowercase letters that have portions descending below the baseline, 
making them less easy to distinguish from other letters, e.g. j (vs. 
i), y (vs. v), etc.


Grant
-- 
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Grant Jacobs Ph.D.                                     BioinfoTools
ph. +64 3 478 0095  (office, after 10am)               PO Box 6129,
or  +64 27 601 5917 (mobile)                               Dunedin,
gjacobs@bioinfotools.com                               NEW ZEALAND.
    Bioinformatics tools: deriving knowledge from biological data
Bioinformatics tools - software development - consulting - training
  15 years experience in bioinformatics ready to solve your problem
Check out the website for more details: http://www.bioinfotools.com

Received on Monday, 1 September 2008 02:08:53 UTC