https://bz.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=3959
--- Comment #278 from tsudhonimh <[email protected]> --- I just finished editing and layout for a friend's PhD dissertation. It has 150 or so pages of text, tables with titles, images with captions, appendices with more images and tables, several pages of Matlab code with comments, and all the academic rigamarole in the front matter, footnotes and pagination. There is no way in Hades that Open/LibreOffice could have been used for that document without missing the deadline. (In reply to mroe from comment #275) > Which restrictions you find in Writer? How does OpenOffice's "Navigator" restrict me compared to what I can do with the full-featured outline view, let me count the ways ... and this list is with only a few minutes doing things that I have to do repeatedly while writing. They all relate to how OO makes it harder for me to get things done in a complex document. They all relate to OO's making it harder to have a smooth workflow and harder to create a document where the information is in logical order and levels of importance are clear than MSWord does. 1 - It takes up screen space I need for doing layout. A proper outline mode would merely switch the view within the active window, without popping up another window. 2 - It's a split screen with poor integration to the document, requiring me to find the section in the Navigator or document, click or double click it to go to the section, then do what I need to in the section, go back to the other window ... over and over and over. Promoting and demoting requires me to select stuff on one screen, find it on the Navigator screen (see point 3), click the promoter or demote button and then go back and make sure it worked. 3 - It's not bidirectional ... if I doubleclick on something in the Navigator it will pull up that section of the document in the text window. If I doubleclick on a heading in the document, it does not highlight that section in the navigator. And I often need to see where a bit of information is in a document, looking for the most logical place to move it to. 4 - It does not show me the formatting of the headings. Sounds picky, but when chunks of text are coming from several sources, checking for uniform formatting of the headings is critical, and showing just the headings with MSWord's optional "show styles and formatting" makes it easy. OO makes it impossible. 5 - The Tables and Images are not shown under their section headings in the Navigator, they are in separate listings with no indication of what heading they are under - that is NOT a useful map of my document. 6 - The tables and images are in separate lists, so I don't have an easy way to make sure that tables are in the correct position with respect to the images they accompany. 7 - Text is not shown under a header in the navigator. I often have a heading with just a sentence saying "TBD", or "Chuck owes me this info by Tuesday" ... I can scan the document first lines in MSWord's outline view and spot those things if I have the "show first line of the paragraph" is active. I can't with the Navigator. ====================== The suggestion, which has been repeated several times, that an author use a stand-alone outliner and then import the outline into OO and then do the writing ignores the way that most professional writers work. As the work develops, as reviewers give us input, we add and move text, adding and removing headings, moving content around until the information flow is smooth and easy to follow through the document. The suggestion that we should fork the project and write that feature ourselves has also been made. Does anyone seriously think that if any of the persons who have voted for this feature KNEW how to do it they would not have just DONE it already? The suggestion has been made that we pay to have someone do it, and that it would take 50K euros or so ... I'll start a kickstarter or gofundme with payment to be delivered if and only if the enhancement is released into the main distribution with all the requested features working as specified. The things holding it up - some sort of refactoring - have apparently been taken care of, so it should be an easy chunk of money for someone. ====================== If you wonder why it's hard to get professional writers to work on Linux documentation, wonder why the Linux documentation is legendary for its suckiness ... why should a professional writer work for FREE for the very people who don't take OUR tool requirements seriously. -- You are receiving this mail because: You are on the CC list for the issue.
