Thread:VisualEditor/Feedback/Feedback for the character inserter/reply (49)

Hi, french editor here :)

Firsts things first: the actual characters we have nowadays are useless in french (most of the accented characters already exist on the french AZERTY keybord, and the symbols are not the oft used symbols we need like the french quotation marks). Also I am not a big user of the Visual Editor, but I have tried it some, and even if I am still not convinced by its purpose, I think improving it is important.

To introduce my reasoning on the special character question, I would like to remind you that while templates can be mostly skipped when writing, and references are useful but most often added at a rate of 1 ref/multiple sentences, special chars on the other hand are part of the writing. If we need easy access to templates and references, then we doubly need twice easyer access to the special chararacters because if putting refs can be done afterwards, adding little [1] at the end of the sentences, writing your regular lengthy article will require the use of all those pesky little «» ± ó æ Á É right in the middle of the sentences we write.

So, answering some of the questions asked in the dedicated section of the VisualEditor french suggestion page: Good luck implementing the special characters in VE
 * Yes we would need the whole wikieditor special character toolbar. For one, nobody can predict what characters they will need while editing. I might need greek letters for a physics article, then edit some article about some czech woman or something and need some accents non accessible on the french AZERTY keyboard.
 * The whole toolbar won't be too much, it will just be enough. Even in the french community keyboard-related problems about apostrophes are a reoccuring matter because people won't have access to the same keyboard in a language community.
 * The pop-up sorta thing should go down the drain : special characters are too plentyful to be used as a pop-up. Microsoft Word is an example of the sort of thing a pop-up would become : a huge jumble of signs, symbols and letters, all together in a invasive pop-up window in the middle of the text frame, superimposed on the text, making it unnerving when we want to add just a single character, or multiple characters in different places in the text. Please, prettty please don't do that.
 * A good vertical or horizontal toolbar/tab, taking the whole length/width of the editing window would be good, that you can wrap/unwrap so as to have easy and quick access to the characters without the thing blocking your view from the text. Different tabs would allow us to go from one set to the other, since the worst possible thing would be to have all the characters in the same frame, making users go crazy finding the right character (Microsoft Word, again...)
 * For users without enough place to store all the characters in a few lines, two things should be done in my opinion:
 * For starters reduce the size of the little buttons to click. Seriously, being user friendly slash omg so cool and design doesn't mean we should have small letters/symbols encapsulated in huge squarish buttons. Reduce the size or use the whole space of those squares, because for the time being it feels like a ot of free empty unused space. That way, more special characters will be encompassed in the pop-up/tab/navigation bar/whatever
 * Second add a scroll. Really, scrolling is like, the basics. Not enough place to store everything ? Scroll.
 * A special section with the ten/twenty or so most used characters would be so so nice.
 * La barre d'outils a déjà trop d'options. Comment la simplifier ?/The toolbar has already too many options. How do we simplify it? Well... You have to ways of figuring this out:
 * The VisualEditor is only some sort of simplified editing tool, sorta like Wikipedia-for-dummies thing, adapted for people unfamiliar with the internet/the computers/whatever. Then you can already scratch all those template-adding, special characters and such, because this should be made simple and would be a tool designed for occasional editors
 * The VisualEditor is destined to be some sort of alternative for all the editors: well then you're screwed because the actual, nowadays, code-like interface does a humonguous number of different things, so the VE toolbar will reflect this state of things and be a humonguous thing. And thus, the VE won't be easy to use even for people unfamiliar with code editing: no amount of nice little buttons with cutesy little logos and images will be able to simplify the understanding of a newbie in front of Wikipedia. It takes time, practice, and help from humans... (Help that is made kinda hard to give since you just never know what tool the newbies will use...) Anyway, I am rambling and straying on another path here, sorry ;)