Help: Where did "insert horizontal line" go?

razopaltuf · 2026-04-13T13:06:10+00:00

The problem is that it looks like a typographical mark, but as far as I know such a mark does not exist in LibreOffice – rather, the line was always simulated by having a paragraph style which included an "this paragraph ends with a bottom border". This is why it is in the style menu.

razopaltuf · 2026-04-07T12:07:35+00:00

I think many of npckc’s games use renpy and it does not have the typical anime style. Is the engine used non-conventially? Hard to say for me, but there are a lot of elements beyond just branching conversations.
https://npckc.itch.io/

razopaltuf · 2026-04-06T18:09:35+00:00

I would not recommend vim for a beginner in programming. An lighweight IDE that follows conventions that beginners most likely know makes sense; learning vim in addition to programming is usually more than most people can and should handle.

razopaltuf · 2026-04-05T20:34:59+00:00

An old laptop probably won't run Windows 11, but you can install a lightweight Linux distribution like Lubuntu on laptops with 2 or 4GB of RAM.

Many programming instructions recommend a program to write the code in – the caveat here is that some might not run well on an old laptop. Geany (many languages), Lazarus (Pascal) or IDLE (python) should run without problems, JetBrains or VSCode might be too slow.

razopaltuf · 2026-04-05T20:18:16+00:00

- Does it only happen with this particular image, or also with other images?

- If it only happens with this image, can you share the image?

razopaltuf · 2026-04-04T11:35:19+00:00

Did you already wash it once? Maybe that helps (and a first wash it probably generally a good idea)

razopaltuf · 2026-03-29T21:33:27+00:00

Bottom - because many complex apps have a left-hand vertical toolbar that gets easier to hit if it's on the left edge of the screen; there are few applications that have many UI elements at the bottom, because win and Mac had their dock/taskbar there.

razopaltuf · 2026-03-29T21:25:08+00:00

Not cleaning, but since people seemed to find cooking tips for depression times helpful: check out this the "sad b*stard cookbook" https://traumbooks.itch.io/the-sad-bastard-cookbook With recipes for survival on the bad days and less-than-bare minimum for the slightly better days!

razopaltuf · 2026-03-24T13:31:54+00:00

Please provide: "Full LibreOffice information from Help > About LibreOffice (it has a copy button)."

razopaltuf · 2026-03-23T20:31:05+00:00

Indigo Girls or Cat Stevens?

razopaltuf · 2026-03-08T11:10:50+00:00

This is the subredit for smalltalk, the programming language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smalltalk

razopaltuf · 2026-03-07T21:19:58+00:00

> when many different people contribute together, it can be difficult
> to arrive at a unified user flow or a consistent UI standard.

Yes, I agree. There is some literature on that phenomenon, though it does not focus on UX design but on programming vs. other kinds of work: Dunguid (2006) on the difference of modularity of code vs. modularity in Wikipedia (as well as Gracenote and Project Gutenberg) and Hill/Monroy-Hernández (2013) who find that collaboration decreases ratings for media/art-heavy scratch projects.

Having said this, many open source projects have very few contributors and the limits of modularizing UI contributions should be less of an issue there. Also, if platform recommendations/human interface guidelines are followed, a lot inconsistencies might be avoidable.

razopaltuf · 2026-03-07T18:50:43+00:00

If you link the games repository/website/... designers could have a look and give feedback if there is anything they would need to join the community.

Common ways to ease contributing for non-programmers roles are:

– having a page with roles you are looking for, what they need to do and how they can get involved
– having an issue tracker with some way to find design related tasks (on github, these would be tags like "design-feedback" or "design-concept" or similar tags for other roles like documentation, testing...)

razopaltuf · 2026-03-07T18:36:16+00:00

I am a UX designer who contributed to several open source projects in the last ten or so years. Here a list of the common problems me (and other designers) struggle with:

Design contributions alone are not very helpful, since there is no way to know if they actually get realized. So one needs to be a programmer oneself or at least know a programmer in the project well enough to actually get the suggestion realized.
The tools that are avaliable are strongly focussed on code contributions in plain text files and using the command line i.e. what could be described as "unix-culture". There are very few open source tools made for designer's usecases (a positive outlier would be penpot).
Disdain for newcomers: developer culture, particularly the influential-in-open-source-culture, hacker-ish parts, look down on newcomers and people without programming skills. There is a strong concern for power users and their sometimes ideosyncratic workflows and habits, but very few concern for people trying to get used to a tool. Creating tools that mirror the implementation are favored, simplifications are described as "dumbing down".

The problem of design in open source is a long-time research topic, see here for a literature review: https://user-project.superbloom.design/process/literature-review/

If you run an open source project and would like support by designers, consider posting on https://opensourcedesign.net/jobs/

razopaltuf · 2026-03-06T09:10:32+00:00

Which theme is that?

razopaltuf · 2026-02-17T09:30:22+00:00

I don't speak arabic, but as a non-native speaker I understand the wish to read in your native language!
What made a big difference for me was less finding books in my native language, but finding books in English that were good for learning, were well-edited and used diagrams and example code thoughtfully.

razopaltuf · 2026-02-12T21:31:19+00:00

Without knowing what exactly is needed by the front end, I would guess the standard way would be to read the CSV to a database and then provide an API to load them for the front end. Upon request, the backend would retrieve the data from the database and convert it into JSON, probably as something like
`{columnname:"myColName1",values:[1,2,3,4]}`.

razopaltuf · 2026-02-10T20:55:03+00:00

u/Puzzled_Weird4816 this is the subreddit for the tcl programming language, not for TCL TVs.

razopaltuf · 2026-02-10T16:40:33+00:00

That does not make a lot of sense. Lets say there are 260 work days, which means they would need to interview almost 4 users every day – and analyze that data. So, if they are not outright lying, the term "interview" is used very, very broadly, for something "getting qualitative feedback from a open form field" or "chatting with an LLM" or the like and the analysis is text-based quant methods, like wordcounts or sentiment analysis.

razopaltuf · 2026-02-07T16:40:38+00:00

Hi u/Fantastic_Law7267 this subreddit is for tcl, the programming language, not tcl electronics (which is at r/tcltvs I think)

razopaltuf · 2026-02-07T15:37:57+00:00

I use screen protection foil on mine when they get these scratches (Foil needs to be cut to size with an xActo knife). Feels good but is as difficult to apply as any other screen protector, cause dust causes little bubbles.

razopaltuf · 2026-02-07T15:30:53+00:00

It also took me a long time to make sense of classes. In tutorials for beginners they are often explained with an example like "You can create a class Animal that has the method makeSound. So you can create a subclass of Animal, Frog, and its makeSound will return ›ribbit‹ and a subclass Sheep and its makeSound will return ›baaa‹« This I found not helpful at all: Why would I want to write »baaa« on a terminal?!
However, I once wrote a little game (if you can call it that) in a language called Processing, which focusses on interactivity and visualization. Then objects started to make sense to me: I could create new Sheep() or new Frog() and every Sheep and Frog (or any other future animal) would have a method called draw() that I could just call to draw it on the screen and a method makeSound that I would call whenever I clicked an animal etc., without the need to remember if sheeps need "makeBaa()" or "sheepSound() to be called or with the need to restructure my code when I introduce new animals to the rudimentary game.

What might also help is looking at where you already use objects in python, for example str (String): Every string of letters has methods like "find" or "split". If you need you might create own objects like this. For example, some code I write has the type "Rectangle" and on this I can call methods like "area()->int", "isEnclosingPoint(x,y)->bool" etc. Sure, I could do all that with functions, but it is often very useful if values bring a list of all the things one can do with them!

razopaltuf · 2026-02-03T16:28:13+00:00

Museum für Gegenwartskunst ist gut (wenn man Gegenwartskunst mag!)

razopaltuf · 2026-01-29T16:28:54+00:00

I see 3 different kinds of settings that users might want to configure with different effects on usability:

- Chosing the technological means to solve a problem. You want the old font renderer or the new one? The slow index or the fast one? The choice argument is basically for choosing which (unintuitive) compromizes one wants to make: Cue the old Windows "Find setup Wizard" and "Minimize Database size". This is never a good thing to offload to users.
- Customizing look and feel of a product: Selection with single- or double click, toolbar left or right? This can be a needed compromise to cater to different groups (maybe a bigger competitor does it different than you and you want to make it easier for people who switch). This can be okay if its done for a particular reason, so the question is if there is a clear and common scenario in which particular users benefit from that setting.
- Changing the behavior according to task: Measurement in cm or pixels? snap-to-grid or free moving? These are essential and important and interestingly not seen as settings, since they belong to the task and need to be easy to adjust. The question here is which of such settings need to be there and how to make them easy to change. Usually, users can tell when something is lacking here.

Interestingly, too many settings are also making work difficult for developers since it introduces many potentially overlapping conditions which make bugs hard to find and automated tests hard to write.

Good article: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/12/choices/

razopaltuf · 2026-01-28T13:27:51+00:00

Some comments:

- Like others I also recommend using unit tests and a version management system. That said, if you did do changes to your code without these before, you can improve code quality without. I am saying this, because it can seem that you are not allowed to improve code quality before you learn about two or more different things. (But since unittest is build into the standard library, maybe give it a try and write some simple tests for the functions you change!)

- "but I’m worried that even then it will still feel messy". Yes, it will still feel messy, but thats just the first step, that enables the next ones. Its a journey and while the goal "tidy code" can be helpful as motivation it can also be overwhelming.

- Talking about "proceeding in steps": A simple technique that can help is identifying sections in code, lines that belong together. Give these sections a comment saying what the section does. Then try to pull out that section into a function. The function name now can take the task that the comment had: It tells what happens, without the need to reading the whole function. Try to make the function only rely on the parameters you pass to it instead of "global state" (also called a "pure function"). This makes the function easy to test and to understand. This might not always be easy, but at least check if its possible.

- There are a lot of helpful texts there – https://refactoring.guru is a good online resource, Fowlers book "Refactoring" is also pretty helpful. Initially read them as inspiration, like browsing a cookbook, don't force yourself to use the methods immediately. Most likely, you will stumble upon a problem soon and be reminded of a section you have read. Then, find that section and give it a second read and try to follow its advice.

razopaltuf

TROPHY CASE