Oliver, You can get much of the behavior you desire by defining User Fields instead of Input Fields. They have the added benefit of being global. In other words, if you change one at the end of the document, and that same field appears at the beginning, BOTH fields change if you edit either one of them. The only thing User Fields won't offer you is the editing if the doc is read-only.
Why would you want to traverse all the input fields? OpenOffice, of course, does that automatically when you have Input fields in a template. You complain that you cannot back up to the previous field. But if you've made a mistake in the previous field, just click in that field when you've finished all of them, and make your correction. Although I find that to be my preferred way of making corrections, your requirements may differ. Perhaps you could write a macro to list all the fields and allow you to change their contents in a dialog? Regards, Jim On Feb 6, 2013, at 10:23 AM, Oliver-Rainer Wittmann <orwittm...@googlemail.com> wrote: > Hi, > > recently I got notice about our (from my point of view) very user-unfriendly > way for editing Input Fields in Writer. > Currently, you can not place the cursor into an Input Field which in general > is shown with a grey background when Menu View - Field Shading is on. If you > click on the Input Field, a modal dialog pops up. In this dialog you can edit > the Input Field's content. On confirmation of the dialog the Input Field's > content is changed in the text document. To edit the next Input Field you > need to click on it. There is also a special key shortcut - namely > Shift-Ctrl-F9. This key shortcut opens the Input Field content editing dialog > for the first field. This time the dialog has a Next button by which you can > confirm your change and switch directly to the next Input Field. A Previous > button is not available. By Murphys law the dialog hides most of the time the > Input Field in the text document. > > I have got the opinion that such an editing experience is bad, especially, if > the document is a form which makes use of a lot of Input Fields to be filled > by the user. > > My idea is to be able to edit the Input Fields directly in the text > document's content together with some special handling. The special handling > which I had in mind is: > - Some special key handling to "travel" from Input Field to Input Field, > forward and backward. May be key Ctrl-Tab for forward movement and > Shift-Ctrl-Tab for backward movement. > - Feedback when the user "enters" (cursor inside Input Field) and "leaves" > (cursor outside Input Field) a Input Field. May be some transparent overlay, > similar to the selection overlay, when the cursor is inside a Input Field. > - Even if the document is read-only, the editing of the Input Fields should > be possible when configured correspondingly. > > What is your opinion about the current Input Field editing? > What is your feedback on my idea to improve the editing of Input Fields? > > If I found time, I would like to implement such an improvement. > Unfortunately, I do not have the resources, now. > > Everybody volunteering to help/to provide feedback on development, qa, user > experience, documentation, translation of possible new UI and the new > documentation is welcome. > > > Best regards, Oliver. > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscr...@openoffice.apache.org > For additional commands, e-mail: users-h...@openoffice.apache.org > --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscr...@openoffice.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: users-h...@openoffice.apache.org
