© 2004
Canonical Ltd.
•
Terms of use
•
Data privacy
•
Contact Launchpad Support
•
Blog
•
Careers
•
System status
•
67d34a1
(Get the code!)
This bug is more than two years long, and still nothing has been done. Maybe we forgot that the main focus of Ubuntu is to be simple and intuitive. In this light, the empty "Create Document" menu is frustrating for standard and new users (and even for advanced users, as it seems according to many of the comments in this bug) and we should do something to fix it. We can fix it quickly first, and then take the time to re-thing about its expected feature in a second time.
So, as I see it, there is two succesives steps to do: an easy step to quickly fix this bug, and a more extensive approach to rework the feature itself.
* The Quick & Easy step:
-------
It would consists in using the current mecanism of Nautilus, and we just need to create of a few empty files in ~/Templates to populate the currently empty menu and fix this bug.
We could add inside ~/Templates some symlinks to /usr/share/
The few default empty files to populate the "Create Document" menu could be:
- LibreOffice Writer.odt
- LibreOffice Calc.ods
- LibreOffice Impress.odp
And of course keep the current "Empty File"
Adding an option "Edit My Templates..." which would open Nautilus at ~/Templates is also a very nice idea.
We should also think of the translation of those entries. But using the application's name for the files may help to avoid this problem (I don't know about that, but at least on my French system, Writer, Calc and Impress are used as-is and are not translated -- wether its a good think or not is another problem)
This quick fix requires:
- to store a few templates in Nautilus package (or in its own "ubuntu-
- a mecanism to add the symlinks to users' ~/Templates directory if present (they should be added only once, because users may want to remove them)
* The Long & Best step:
-------
(it requires a new bug to discuss and work on it)
bra10n and Vish's points of view are very correct in term of user ergonomy IMHO. Nobody just wants to create a file without editing it (do you?). Therefore the right-click menu would be much better if it could be used to launch applications pre-opened with the chosen template (would it be an empty file or a real template) and save the file (in the current location) only after user has made changes and/or choose to save it.
Contrary to the Quick&Easy fix, this one do absolutely requires a non-hidden ~/Templates directory because the files inside it would be "real" templates made by the user for her own needs.
When viewing ~/Templates in Nautilus, it should display an info-bar (like when viewing the Trash, as suggested Martin Lettner) to notify the user that she can add her own template-files here in order to use them from the right-click menu.
Also, we should not forget that some applications have their own template system. For LibreOffice it is in ~/.libreoffice/
Anyway, all this Long&Best approach is not the answer to this very bug (which is only: "Create Document" Templates difficult to use). It seems to me that it's a new feature and requires its own thinking thread/bug.
https:/