https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=38159
--- Comment #12 from Joe Hudson <[email protected]> --- (In reply to comment #11) > There is no global feature prioritization in LibreOffice - that is left to > the wisdom of the crowds of people contributing to the code-base, either > volunteers or companies. In the case of the two features you mentioned, I > believe paying customers of contributing companies reported interop. bugs > against this - and as such they had their bugs fixed :-) > > There are plenty of people eager to be paid to implement features for those > willing to incentivise them; failing that - jump in and hack on the code > yourself if you want to effect positive change: there is enough mentoring > support to help you make that a success - would be great to have you > contributing in that way. > > Michael. Thanks Michael, I understand the broadly crowd led nature of development, and the influence of funding. A couple of years ago I got in touch of Laszo and offered to help in implementing the pro quality text justification feature that he'd also had in mind to make. If I remember correctly he said it was maybe 6 months away at the time and there wasn't much I could do in way of collaboration.. Regarding crowd selection of feature priority, I'm in full agreement with that in principle. I do think though that sometimes the wider value of a feature can be very easy to miss for those not already aware of it. In the case of decent full text justification, if you held two full justified articles side by side, the one with simplistic single line based justification will look ugly and be distracting to read by comparison to the less simplistic paragraph based justified article. It wouldn't take an expert or typography buff to realize it, it's just much nicer looking and easier to read. However, probably not so many people would be able to pinpoint why the latter article looked so much better and say 'well, that's the benefit right there of decent paragraph based full text justification with character scaling'. Imagine if the feature was implemented and all the full justified reports, articles and books produced in LibreOffice looked so slick, without tediously going through line by line and stretching words through character properties, or redoing the whole thing in LaTex or Scribus (and losing the convenience and comfort of LO). You'd get more professional users, and thus more people with the funds to contribute to further development. And from that it would add to the prestige and perceived quality of LO. Currently with the more advanced font features Laszo and also others put into LO from around v3.2, the full justification situation is a bit of an incongruence and bottleneck to more professional update I think. (yes the algorithm isn't going to be perfect, but it would save a huge amount of labour.) Thus, I think if there was some (non-authoritarian) leadership from prominent LO developers on communicating the value of this feature, then everyone, developers, general users and professionals on a budget might benefit. What do you think? -- You are receiving this mail because: You are the assignee for the bug.
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