Re: Tabbed dialogs

[Jo Baer <jbaer -at- mailbox1 -dot- tcfbank -dot- com>]

Andy, I agree, it's not the clean elegant solution. It's particularly
problematic with Frame's para and char designer dialog boxes because you
can also use a pull-down? drop-down? (take your pick; I don't want to
start another holy war) list to display the properties you want to
define. 

In most of the documentation I've seen, these little doohickeys have
been referred to as tabs. "In Paragraph Designer, click the Basic tab to
blah blah blah." Once you've made it clear in a procedure which dialog
box you're working with, you should just be able to refer to the names
of the tabs. "Next, click the Pagination tab to tweedle-dee-dee." I
believe the thought process, if any, behind this is that the little
doohickeys look like the tabs on manila file folders. *I* don't think
that should confuse most people, but I've been wrong before!

Andy -dot- Kubrin -at- tanner -dot- com wrote:
> 
> snip
> 
> Reading the thread on menu commands reminds me of a piece of unfinished
> business around here.
> 
> How do you (does one) refer to individual tabs of a dialog?  For example, do
> you write "Paragraph Designer dialog, Basic tab"?  "Paragraph Designer
> (Basic)"?  Some other variant?
> 
> After spirited debate, our doc group settled on "Paragraph Designer--Basic,"
> with an em-dash in place of the hyphens, but I've never been satisfied with
> this solution. 
> snip

Jo Baer
Senior Technical Writer
TCF Financial Corporation
Minneapolis, Minnesota

Tell me what you need, and I'll 
tell you how to get along without it.
	Dilbert