Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 166448
FC4 desktop icons for OpenOffice have terrible useablility
Last modified: 2013-03-05 22:44:16 EST
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050719 Epiphany/1.6.3 Description of problem: OpenOffice-2 introduced a new color-coding scheme for it's component document types: blue for text docs, green for spreadsheets, orange for presentations, yellow for drawings and red for databases. This follows an idea well used by Microsoft Office: by giving each component application document it's own distinct color, document types are easily identified at a glance. The desktop icons for OO documents in FC4 totally violate this scheme. Worse still, the icons used by FC to replace the stock OOo ones are low-contrast and they all share an identical color scheme. This makes it nearly impossible to visually distinguish e.g. presentations from text-documents in a folder full of OOo files. Please can we have the original OOo-2 icons back! Or at least replace them with ones which share the OOo document color scheme. I feel useability should be prioritised above FC branding. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): all How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Open a folder full of OOo documents 2. Develop a aquint trying to select one Impress document within a load of text-documents 3. visit optician ... Additional info:
for bug 156065 we dropped the upstream icons
Created attachment 118086 [details] screenshot showing the current OOo office document icons The icons are very hard to distinguish in a folder containing many documents because: 1) they all have a similar overall outline 2) they have a similar colour-scheme 3) the differences between the icons rely on the icon detail i.e. one must read "ODT", "ODS"or "ODP" annotations to know what one is looking at. The rest of the icon contains too much detail to see clearly. OOo-Draw documents doesn't have a proper icon at all.
Note, I'm refering to the document icons, not the application launchers, which appears to be what bug #156065 refers to. Sorry if I wasn't clear about this. See attachment above. Obviously, it would be good if the application lauchers and document icons were consistent. I also disagree with the comment under bug #156065 that humans can distinguish shapes more easily than colour. I think it would be better to give the each document-type a distinct colour than a distinct shape. When scanning a folder containing many many icons, the shapes are not easily picked out by eye, since the dominant "shape" you see is the grid-layout of the icons. However, different colours stand out on a grid quite clearly. Try this for yourself! ... create 20 spreadsheets and 3 presentations in the same folder an see how easy it is to spot the presentations from the others.
While the current behavior is wrong and I will be updating redhat-artwork to refrence the correct Bluecurve icons (which match the application icons), we will not be addressing the color issue at this time. If you wish to have the upstream icons you can replace the correct icons in the /usr/share/icons/Bluecurve/<size>/mimetype directory but this will be overwritten on upgrades of the redhat-artwork package. Alternately you can create your own theme that inherits from Bluecurve and place the icons in that theme. Take a look at how this is done in /usr/share/icons/Clearlooks/ which inherits from Bluecurve and only adds a couple of icons.
Might work in the colors later, but for now, we're going to make the icons match the application icons.
This report targets the FC3 or FC4 products, which have now been EOL'd. Could you please check that it still applies to a current Fedora release, and either update the target product or close it ? Thanks.
Fedora Core 4 is no longer maintained. Setting status to "INSUFFICIENT_DATA". If you can reproduce this bug in the current Fedora release, please reopen this bug and assign it to the corresponding Fedora version.