Joost Andrae wrote:
Hello Mike,
please tell me the need _why_ one single paragraph needs to have more
that 64k strings and why this issue should be handled with more
attention ?
Changing this string size is AFAIK not that easy because other objects
may depend on it.
Kind regards, Joost
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Joost,
Thanks for the response.
From my reading of the discussions, there seem to be at least four reasons:
- it is a legal necessity for certain legal documents to be one
paragraph only. Thus, users who need to create and edit such documents
cannot currently use OpenOffice. There is no work-around.
- the editing process for cleaning up long documents, eg a book, is
often facilitated by the temporary removal of paragraph marks, ie at an
intermediate stage the document is reduced to a single paragraph. There
is an obvious workaround, but it is messy and dangerous. Reverting to MS
Word for this stage is therefore the most likely choice.
- the problem is continually being re-discovered by users, witness the
number of duplicate issues. Each of those represent significant time
wasted both by the users and the wider OOo community and also possibly
have led to data loss for the users concerned. This perhaps underlines
the fact that the need is much more common than intuitively one might
expect.
- MS Word does not have this restriction, therefore opening an MS Word
document with a 'long' paragraph will immediately lead to problems.
I understand why people intuitively might wonder why on earth such long
paragraphs are necessary. Perhaps this is one of those occasions when
intuition is misleading?
FWIW, my view on the issue is that it is sufficiently serious from a
usability perspective that it really does have to be fixed and that
despite the difficulty of sorting it out and the competing demands of
alternative work, the reputation of OpenOffice with an important class
of users is otherwise at risk. Those creating long documents and long
paragraphs are, by the nature of what they have done, serious players
and the product arguably needs to support their work.
--
Mike Hall
www.onepoyle.net
