Talk:Summary
Summary Tab
Background for anyone coming in fresh to this - John produced an earlier prototype of the summary tab. The biggest difference was that prototype did not include borders around the various fields.
The 'scrap parchment' design will, I think, be quite difficult to implement. I also feel that the borders are a bit heavy.
Our planned approach to handling the parchment background was to add that to the tab by means of a custom Java Look and Feel. Each panel (e.g. Character Basics) would then be made transparent so that the parchment was shown in that panel. This preserves the normal function of having the UI resize when the window is resized and giving extra room where it is helpful. With the 'scrap parchment; design we would be up for a lot more work with a backing image needed for each panel and custom borders for each side of each panel. Resizing would also be problematic - presumably we would have to allow for borders and the panel image to be resized. To my mind this is a lot more effort then the first prototype and I think that one looked fantastic as is.
The new headings look great and shouldn't be too tough to implement. The only factor that might be difficult is internationalisation - here we might need to try and render these as text rather than graphics, to allow for different languages, but with a suitable font that should be ok.
In your Statistics section could you show a racial and other modifier just to show how the columns should work please?
PS: I assume the fonts used are either open source or distributed with Java? Bets to avoid commercial fonts in an FOSS application like ours.
Oh and lastly - as I mentioned before - John, I am really impressed by the design and I think this is an amazing makeover. I'm looking forward to getting in and making it happen.
--James 20:44, 9 March 2010 (UTC)
I'm just one user voice in the crowd, but I think the whole parchment thing is a bit busy and hokey. I get my RPG feeling at the gaming table...I don't really need it within the character editing program.
--Allen Cohn, San Francisco, 9 March 2010
