Brian:
Many thanks for going to the trouble. Responses to your points are
interwoven in green below.
On 24 Apr 2014, at 16:35, Brian Barker wrote:
At 15:10 24/04/2014 +0100, Nobody Noname wrote:
How long does it take to fix a bug, please?
When they are not bugs, a long time!
Yes, surely, very droll. But when they are... ?
Two of the examples were subsequently confirmed as bugs. But it took 4
and a half years for BUG 98752 to be confirmed as a bug, and that was
after Hagar Delest had confirmed it, as previously referenced. The
other took more than two years.
In this, am presuming that if a bug is unconfirmed, it is not in the
pipe to get fixed, and has in practice been dismissed. So all of that
time is dead time.
https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=98752
EXAMPLE 3: UPDATING STYLES - BUG 121785
https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=121785
Reported 18 Feb 2013. There is a problem with updating styles, which
doesn't behave as stated in help (which covers the topic very badly).
Are you sure this is a bug?
Yes. If you go to Help and follow the steps in 'Updating Styles From
Selections' the style is not updated. It fails at step 3. So users are
stuffed, essentially. Also see the pin note at the same reference.
Suppose there is a technical argument that it is not a bug because the
program is right and Help is wrong, but from the users' point of view
there is something very seriously wrong. So it needs to be fixed,
whatever you want to call it.
NB That Help does not mention the toolbar icon for updating styles.
Nor does it mention control click/update paragraph style.
o If you change the format of just some part of a paragraph, you have
not changed the paragraph, so I would not expect or want any update to
affect the paragraph style. I might want a character style updated,
but that would presuppose that I'd made the change to an area that
already had a non-default character style already applied.
Fair point. You can argue it both ways. But:
While Help tells you that it should, that is what should happen.
Pages works that way. Given apple's marketing preeminence, that would
seem to suggest that it is not such a bad idea.
Working on long documents, it is much quicker and easier to change a
small section then update the style than have to do some precision
cursor work to amend and select the whole paragraph - which may bridge
a page or more.
Note that, unlike the Default paragraph style, the Default character
style has no properties and cannot be modified - or, therefore,
updated.g
You can change the default paragraph style using control click or
right click/update paragraph style... Provided the cursor is in
default style when you do so.
o The behaviour of the Update Style menu item in the Styles and
Formatting dialogue is dependent on the style selected in that
dialogue - and this relies in turn on the selection of style types
through the buttons in its toolbar. Note that you may have a character
style and a paragraph style, say, with the same name. Your continued
reference to plain "styles" suggests you may be missing this
distinction.
Sorry for any imprecision. Paragraph styles infinitely more important
in any serious word processing. That is why they are the only ones
displayed in the toolbar drop down list.
o Your workaround through the context menu (and there is nothing
"secret" about that, of course) works because that way you clarify
that you are wanting to affect a paragraph style.
From the point of view of the ordinary user who does not know Open
Office backwards it is secret because:
It is not mentioned in Help - see above
There is no icon for it
There is no menu item for it.
So unless you happen to stumble into it, you do not know it is there.
Which is a real shame, because it is the most useful way to update
styles, and at times the only certain and foolproof one.
o The behaviour of paragraph styles, character styles, and direct
formatting does take a bit of learning.
It has certainly been a long and arduous learning curve for me. Assume
the same for others, this is a real shame, as it should not be so
difficult, nor mysterious, nor should you be tripped up by Help
entries that don't work. All of that detracts greatly from the
pleasure and utility of Open Office. My suspicion is that a lot of
folk are stuck with the built in styles which are not to their taste
so either don't use them, so lose functionality, or abandon Open
Office for something else.
EXAMPLE 4 : ICON LABELS BUG 121766
https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=121766
This one is embarrassing. Undo is labelled 'Can't Undo" and Redo
similarly, and have been since 2007 at least, which must be obvious
to millions of users. Astonishing that no-one has picked it up.
I haven't "picked it up" because I see nothing to be picked up. There
are contexts in which you cannot undo anything - for example, when you
have just opened or reloaded a document - and the Undo menu item and
Undo icon are each greyed out and - perhaps helpfully - changed to
read Can't Undo. Similarly for Redo, which means something only
immediately after an Undo and is otherwise greyed out and retitled.
(Why it says Can't Restore instead of Can't Redo I don't know.)
Incidentally, I'm not sure I accept your stricture that "[i]t is also
a very strong imperative that Open Office should be consistent with
other productivity suites". I don't expect free software necessarily
to be a clone of commercial products and I'm happy for OpenOffice to
improve on such alternative products! (I suspect that in the area of
styles it does.)
I trust this helps.
Brian Barker
-------------------------------------------
List Conduct Guidelines: http://openoffice.apache.org/list-conduct.html
To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscr...@openoffice.apache.org
For additional commands, e-mail: users-h...@openoffice.apache.org
