Curious about the organization of controls (option settings) for generating reports.
It appears that many of the controls for generating reports are based on the behind the scenes design of the software. For example in the Relationship Graph report (Reports > Graphs > Relationship Graph) the controls on the Graphviz Layout tab are used to control how Graphviz produces the actual diagram.
Other controls which are logically related seem to be split among unrelated tabs. For example in the Relationship Graph report the controls for the color of various rectangles are located on the Display tab, but the Graph Coloring control is located on the Report Options tab.
From a user perspective the organization of the controls doesn’t appear very intuitive. When searching for a specific control the user often has to look in many different tabs to find the desired control.
I assume in the early days of Gramps development the location of the controls was intuitive, but over time as new controls were added they might have been added to tabs where there was space for a new control. And then one report was created using another report as a starting point and more controls were added. And over time Gramps evolved to where it is today.
Is there a guiding philosophy to the location of the controls? Is there a need (or desire) to reorganize the locations of the controls to be more intuitive to the user? I realize that there are many opinions about the optimal organization of controls but is this something which should be improved (even if not meeting anyone’s opinion of perfect)?
The lack of responses to this post indicates that this is not something which the community sees as a need. I appreciate the community providing a forum for users to discuss the future of the program. Gramps is an impressive program and I am thankful for the tremendous amount of thought and work which has gone into it over the years. Keep up the good work everyone.
The main graph generator I have been using is the Reports > Graphs > Relationship Graph. It appears that the Paper Options, Graphviz Layout, Graphvis Options, and Note control tabs are in a base class and inherited across many reports, so we will ignore those for this discussion. The other control tabs are shown below. Since I am a new user on Discourse I can only add one picture per post. Below is the baseline controls for the Relationship Graph.
These suggestions are just a starting point for discussion. I recognize that what makes sense for me might not make sense for anyone else. And it would probably be good to review all of the reports to try to make a somewhat consistent user interface across them.
