Ticket #575 (Open)Fri Dec 02 17:23:58 UTC 2022
SELECT / ADJUST in interactive Help
| Reported by: | Stuart Swales (8827) | Severity: | Enhancement |
| Part: | RISC OS: Application | Release: | |
| Milestone: | Status | Open |
Details by Stuart Swales (8827):
Given that the mouse buttons have been labelled consistently as ‘Select’ and ‘Adjust’ throughout the Style Guide (save the bit that describes the interactive Help tokens) and (more importantly, perhaps) the User Guide for ‘some time’, is it now time (nearing 5:30) to ADJUST the text presented by interactive Help to reflect that?
If you need a volunteer to do this for the ROM and Disc Apps, I will stick my head above the parapet.
Changelog:
Modified by Sprow (202) Sat, December 10 2022 - 08:46:14 GMT
For the ROM apps, I think they all got changed to use \s and \a escape codes, so there shouldn’t be any hardwired button names in there any more.
A quick scan of the source tree reveals there are SELECT MENU ADJUST in various disc apps, and I think that’s the flaw in this suggestion – all those disc apps in the field which aren’t going to get updated. If those capital letters are truly upsetting I’d suggest filtering them at !Help instead (much like the Wimp has a lookup table of key names to work out whether to right justify them, the KeyNames token).
Next is what or why Acorn chose allcaps in the first place – I suspect it was to highlight the text in amongst a larger sentence. Capitals are easy for the eye to spot and so skim reading
“Select the 3rd rock from the sun”
versus
“Click SELECT to activate the rocket”
are distinct. Now that !Help uses outline fonts my suggestion would be to try bold or italic for the SELECT MENU ADJUST mouse names. Perhaps mock it up in Draw and see which works best?
Beware that !Help (Help in the sources) and !Help (Help2 in the sources) are still both shipped in the disc image, the older one also has to carry round a table of tokens to match the contemporary ROM image, otherwise the escaped messages don’t make sense after detokenisation. That’s another good reason to not change the client side.
Modified by Stuart Swales (8827) Wed, December 14 2022 - 11:22:20 GMT
Filtering the messages on the !Help side is very sensible.
While Bold looks nice to me for mouse button names when transformed to Select Menu Adjust, others may have opinions. So I’d propose having an additional font specifiable in the Help configure plugin.
Modified by Stuart Swales (8827) Wed, December 14 2022 - 13:40:40 GMT
That’d need to default to ‘try Bold’ (or some such) on systems where it hasn’t yet been specified or without a correspondingly updated Configure plugin.
Modified by Sprow (202) Sun, December 18 2022 - 15:28:28 GMT
- Attachment added: Res_xtra,fae
> While Bold looks nice to me for mouse button names when transformed to Select Menu Adjust,
> others may have opinions. So I’d propose having an additional font specifiable in the Help
> configure plugin.
I’ve never heard anyone worrying about shouty SELECT MENU ADJUST before, so probably wouldn’t try over delivering – why only offer a choice of font? What if I want mine showing in red/green/blue instead? It’s a never ending buffet of choice.
I’d pick bold as it seems reasonable and isn’t much effort beyond adding a tick box to enable it (suggestion attached) in Help Setup.
