On Thu, 2004-09-09 at 20:09 -0400, Nathan Summers wrote: > Sven suggested that I direct the mailing list's attention to > http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=152224 to see if there were > any ideas about the best way to go about fixing it. Basically, if you > enter in that you want a 200 mm x 100 mm image using the order that > makes sense (top to bottom, left to right), you enter 200 in width, > 100 in height, and then mm for the units. Unfortunately, if you were > to do that, you would end up with a 17 x 8.5 mm image, since changing > the units causes the width and height to change as well. > > Consistancy is a good thing, of course, and in all the other places > where units are used, this is a very nice behavior to have. But the > new image dialog is different in that there really are no > pre-existing sizes or units, really. You are entering new ones from > scratch. > > It's not absurd to think of a case where having unit conversion in the > dialog box is useful, but most of the time it's not a desirable > behavior. Actually, that's being polite. In reality, it's the kind > of frustrating, annoying thing that I make fun of the stupidity of the > developers when I run across in propriatary code. > It's an interesting task that indeed exposes a problem of the current UI. I have one usage pattern that would suffer if we implement the behavior you propose though: 1) Select A4 from templates. Millimeters is selected as a unit (makes sense). 2) Change to pixels as units to see how much that is really (me no maths please) 3) Oops, 210x297 pixels? The change you propose does make sense in the workflow you propose. The above + consistency with how units behave elsewhere in the interface speak against the change. -- Jakub Steiner <jimmac@xxxxxxxxxx> Novell, Inc.
