https://bz.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=3959
--- Comment #305 from Keith Collyer <[email protected]> --- Over on the LibreOffice wiki someone has created a page (https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/WikiAction/history/Outline_view) for specifying what an Outliner should do. Unfortunately, it doesn't actually have any real content right ow, but maybe that's a place it could be developed. Here is my starter for what is needed (N) means you can do this in Navigator, (W) that you can do it in Word: 1. Display text to any level (W fully; N partially, only for headings) 2. Fold (hide) text under a heading (W) 3. Allow editing in the outline (W) 4. Move, promote and demote text (W fully; N partially, as it does not allow promoting non-headings to headings or demoting headings to non-headings) 5. (Good practice, but not essential) Enforce strict parent-child relationship 6. (Useful, but not essential) Focus on a single "section", including children, hiding, or at least fading, all others Notice neither Word nor OO has all these features. The thing that makes Word's outline editor uniquely powerful is that it does not force you to switch windows (or panes within a window, but it's really the same thing). Someone once said switching windows while working on a computer is like having to go to a different room in a building to do a specific task. Now, for some tasks this is necessary, but for doing your everyday job it should not be. Imagine if you had to be in a different room to write documents from the one you are in to read them. This is why editing in the outline is so valuable. You might be rearranging a document in Word's outline view when you notice a spelling mistake, you can fix it straight away. In Navigator, you wouldn't even see it. This is also why suggestions to use a separate outliner miss the point. You use outlining not just to create the initial structure, but also to work with it afterwards. And suggestions to go back and forth between an outliner and word processor are equally silly for reasons thrashed to death above. Word also has other features that are useful, but to my mind not that valuable, such as optionally displaying a single line of text under a heading. So I would not be looking for a Word clone, I want something better. I suspect that the internal document structure used by OO is what makes this difficult. I don't mean the .odt file format, but how OO holds information in memory. As for Lyx / LaTeX, I would happily use them if I were producing documents just for myself. But I work with a large team and documents are produced collaboratively. Hell with be at absolute zero before they move away from standard word processors. We are supposed to all use OO, but most docs are still in Word. -- You are receiving this mail because: You are on the CC list for the issue. You are the assignee for the issue.
