Okay, now I will try to explain why this is so important for LibreOffice from the point of view of a MS Office switcher. I cannot *comfortably* suggest LO to MS Office users, especially heavy Word users, because first thing they will notice is the lack of this feature. And I know that they will bug about this, because I've had this conversation already several times.
Imagine, you are writing a nice report, something or whatever, it is not important. You want your document to look nice with paragraphs nicely stacked and listed. You have lots of sub-sections on your document, lots of lists, bullets, numberings etc. The first thing you will want to do is arrange these sections, so that one reading your document will understand what is going on there. Eventually you have a ruler, so you will want to use it first. You were already using this ruler for years in MS Word, because it allowed you to arrange document elements with ease and with 0.0 pixel perfection. But when you start to drag the ruler in Writer, you will notice something odd, ruler is not snapping to grids in LO. What?! So you won't be able to arrange items with pre-set length variables, you have to go to Paragraph dialog box, and set each thing manually, - without any or less visual aid. I don't even mention the number of extra clicks to do this. This is probably one of the biggest usability and UX issues LO (OOo, AOO) ever had. Speaking of novice users, no one will bother to look for the Paragraph dialog box, instead they will get irritated about this and probably they will switch back to MS Office, if they have no sense of FOSS or if they do not have financial concerns. I hope this will get some attention from the developers' side, because this is really a serious issue, and it is simply unbelievable to see this wasn't addressed in 20 years. At least this could be an Easy Hack. There has been some noise about this on AOO side, it is possible to check with them also. I hope there is someone with some free time to hack on this. :) I rest my case... Best regards, Emir -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Desktop Packages, which is subscribed to libreoffice in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/370034 Title: [Upstream] No horizontal ruler snapping in Writer Status in LibreOffice Productivity Suite: In Progress Status in The OpenOffice.org Suite: Unknown Status in “libreoffice” package in Ubuntu: Triaged Status in “openoffice.org” package in Ubuntu: Won't Fix Bug description: Binary package hint: openoffice.org 1) lsb_release -rd Description: Ubuntu 11.04 Release: 11.04 2) apt-cache policy libreoffice-writer libreoffice-writer: Installed: 1:3.3.2-1ubuntu5 Candidate: 1:3.3.2-1ubuntu5 Version table: *** 1:3.3.2-1ubuntu5 0 500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ natty-updates/main i386 Packages 100 /var/lib/dpkg/status 1:3.3.2-1ubuntu4 0 500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ natty/main i386 Packages 3) What is expected to happen is when one clicks the horizontal ruler in effort to set up consistent margins, tab stops, and paragraph indents, it snaps to the markers. 4) What happens instead is they have complete freedom of movement. WORKAROUND: Click Format -> Paragraph... -> Indent & Spacing tab and choose desired indents. WORKAROUND: Use AbiWord. apt-cache policy abiword abiword: Installed: 2.8.6-0.3build1 Candidate: 2.8.6-0.3build1 Version table: *** 2.8.6-0.3build1 0 500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ natty/universe i386 Packages 100 /var/lib/dpkg/status ProblemType: Bug Architecture: i386 DistroRelease: LinuxMint 6 Package: openoffice.org-core 1:3.0.1-7ubuntu1~intrepid1 ProcEnviron: PATH=/usr/lib/openoffice/program:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games LANG=en_US.UTF-8 SHELL=/bin/bash SourcePackage: openoffice.org Uname: Linux 2.6.27-7-generic i686 UnreportableReason: This is not a genuine LinuxMint package To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/df-libreoffice/+bug/370034/+subscriptions -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
