SemiOT: Article on User Interface Design

[Fairlight]

On Tue, Jul 24, 2007 at 06:52:43PM -0400, after drawing runes in goat's blood,
J. P. Radley cast forth these immortal, mystical words:
> 
> Well, in my book, the article fails to itself have a good user interface.

But it -printed- beautifully.  :)  (Literally...should see it in colour on
glossy stock.)

> The black text on cloudy gray background is distasteful to the eye.

I have to wonder because the background isn't actually entirely cloudy
grey.  I have a suspicion that, speed issues aside (which -are- present in
Reader due to all the transparency use), your rendering in xpdf is quite
possibly not up to Reader quality.  I say this because NitroPDF, which I
used to do the final edit/lockdown of metadata and permissions, has a
viewer that also rendered it "not near what Reader does".

Fire it up in reader, or take a look at how it looks here:

http://members.iglou.com/fairlite/dtpsample.png

If it didn't look like that, xpdf doesn't handle transparencies well.

> In many years of displaying PDF files, never have I seen one which
> took as long to display page one, and then endless seconds to move
> between pages (using xpdf on a quiescent machine).

It was a little sluggish on page switching and drawing, I'll give you that,
even on a P4-3GHz/2GB it takes a second or three per page.  On the plus
side, once you have a page loaded, it's cached until it's not the next or
previous sequential page--at least in the official Acrobat Reader.

> Eventually the semantic import does add up, but it's a hard slog.

Well, as someone with visual problems already hit me today asking for a
plaintext version, I'll make it generally accessible:

http://media.fairlite.com/pdf/uidesigndoc.zip

That has the Word .doc file.  (No, I'm -not- going to go export it in
OpenOffice.org, even though I installed it the other day...)  :)  I'm only
gonna bend so far, here.  :)

Truth be told, I was going to do the article -anyway- and ended up messing
about with some DTP software I recently got and absolutely love.  If you
look at the PNG above, I'm betting it's nothing like xpdf rendered it for
you, and you'll see that it was quite legible (eyesight issues aside).  I
preferred the aesthetics of a properly rendered version.  I could convert
it to a rasterised version, but I lose text search then.

Everything has its compromises.  I'll evaluate it for future work.  Thanks
for the feedback.

mark->
-- 
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