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List:       koffice-devel
Subject:    usability report of kpresenter/kformula
From:       Eva Brucherseifer <eva () rt ! e-technik ! tu-darmstadt ! de>
Date:       2001-09-27 9:54:45
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Hi all,

the last days I used kpresenter intensively to make a presentation with our 
new "corporate design". Doing this I encountered a number of problems. Some 
are bugs, and some are wish items and maybe there also are things, where I 
didn't choose the right way to do it. 
Here is my list. Please read it as suggestions, to improve an already good 
tool :-) :

* resized jpg and also eps figures look dizzy
This happens both on the monitor and in print. png looks fine. Strange, since 
eps should scale nice as a vector graphic.

* the pictures are not resizable with a fixed ratio of x and y axis (this 
usually can be achived with using the corner points for resizing)

* repaint after resize is buggy - fragments of original pictures still show

* the size and scaling cannot be edited by hand, e.g. to have the same height 
for several pictures

* what unit have Lines-Spacing, Paragraph-Spacing, Margin (in text settings), 
pen width, etc? Can it be made configurable?

* the line spacing in the text should be dependend of the point size of the 
text

* alignment doesn't work in-place, but moves the graphics to the 
left/center/right/etc.

* inserting a long line doesn't work (no object is drawn)
inserting a short line places the line not at the place where I placed the 
crosses. 
 
* lines and pictures are placed in boxes with a minimum hight. Thus smaller 
pictures are scaled larger than the original. Scaling them smaller is not 
possible.

* kword has a very nice management of text styles. Would be nice to have them 
in kpresenter too.

* tabs have constant size and cannot be configured, they cannot be placed at 
a fixed place either

* help lines

* seperation of layout and content is not possible. layer-based layout?

* if you insert an object, it is always on top and cannot be moved to the 
background

* Is it possible to have a transparent background for text objects in editing 
mode? I only found white, and then you don't see other objects you placed 
over the text box.

* automatical page numbers for the footer or better for free placement (via 
insert?)

* insertion of special characters like symbols into the text, e.g. arrows 
and/or
* inline insertion of formulas into text (so that it is placed at the 
baseline of the text and has the right font and spacing)

* placement of objects anchors in other objects. Example: you place an anchor 
of a formula  or picture in a text and if you change the text above the 
anchor, the formula/picture object is moved together with the text around it

* memory usage and saving time seams to be rather large (just a feeling...)

* the following functions/symbols in kformuls: 
  upper and lower indices of a sum
  spacings
  syntax highlighting off by default
  changeble font size

* selected text get's copied - should be configurable (see options in kate)

* ps prints transparent png elements white. I know that ps cannot handle 
transparency, but since kpresenter is a WYSIWYG tool it would be nice to have 
some merge magic to get the right colors.

* kformulas export broken postscript. This one might also result from my  
screwed tex environment setup... 
  
* grouping 2 png pictures together makes them invisible. After trying this 
and undoing several times I somehow managed to change the order of the 
pictures, so that the one that was under the second one is now above.

* marking 2 png pictures, doing copy & paste to a different page changes the 
order too - sometimes ;-) but I found a workaround: Ctrl-X Ctrl-V gives me 
the hidden picture back on the top :-)

* when resizing/placing an object the exact position of the position markers 
in the rulers have some variaty, which depends on where the resize arrow 
relative to the resize marks of the object I want to resize (uuh, did you 
understand this?) Anyway, this way it is not possible to place an object at a 
certain position, which is very important for a design, where you want 
objects to align.

* when I copy & paste Text all formats are lost

* The position of objects cannot be fixed

* in text Objects: there is no newline (Shift-Return). New line gives a new 
paragraph instead.

* space between list bullets and text cannot be changed

* rotation of long lines doesn't work

* images created with Matlab 5.3 are not converted correclty to postscript 
when printing, edge is cut off - bounding box problem? Same with png, jpg, 
tif. After I copied a part of the picture in gimp and saved it to a new file, 
the ps was correct. I copied one of the matlab images to 
http://www.rt.e-technik.tu-darmstadt.de/~eva/download/verrauschtedaten.png

* when saving the kpresenter file, a box with a process bar shows up, but 
kpresenter is much longer busy.

* after working 2 days with this document, all memory and swap is used (256MB 
RAM, 128MB swap). After closing kpresenter memory usage is reduced to 100MB 
RAM and 30% swap. Opening the document with kpresenter again, doesn't give 
more memory usage. Maybe the undo function is not limited?

* somehow we manage to produce pictures with Corel Draw 7, that, when 
imported to kpresenter, are fine on the screen, but when printed they 
disappear... I really have no idea about this. What we changed, was that we 
set the paper color to white. But in gimp the pictures look fine. When I copy 
and paste as new in gimp the png's are fine. I place one of these corel draw 
png's at http://www.rt.e-technik.tu-darmstadt.de/~eva/download/vorwissen-1.png
(page 5 in the presentation)

I am really going mad because of this png stuff... so, I'll send you this 
list and do something else today ;-)

To sumarize this email: 
The biggest problems in kpresenter I see in the text processing and the 
use/printing of pictures. 
The advange of kpresenter is, that it is pretty fast! And the options are 
very clear - no functions, which are hidden in big menu hierarchies, like in 
soffice. 

The presentation I made so far can be found at 
http://www.rt.e-technik.tu-darmstadt.de/~eva/download/presentation.kpr
and the print version at
http://www.rt.e-technik.tu-darmstadt.de/~eva/download/presentation.ps.gz


You have to know, that I never worked with powerpoint. But I quite often made 
presentations using latex and lately also soffice. So most of the features I 
compare to what I know from soffice. I didn't look at the source code, so 
this is mostly from a user's point of view - and not from a developer's view.

Thank you (and sorry for this huge mail...),
eva

PS: If you have any workarounds or tips about the problems I encountered - 
please let me know.

-- 
Dijkstra:
"Testing can prove the presence of bugs, but not their absence."
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