https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=68167
--- Comment #32 from Cougar Brenneman <[email protected]> --- (In reply to comment #28) > Anyway, I'm going to produce a formal user requirements document generously > strewn with use cases and screenshots, in the hope that it provides better > visibility to the needs of users who participate in this thread and helps > willing developers to understand what could be done about it... Maybe some > structure will help us channel all our emotional energy into something > constructive - isn't structure what Outline View is about ? > > Give me a week for a first draft - I'll publish it on the Document > Foundation's wiki. > > For now, I wrote a stub at https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Outline_view > and I'll enhance it with whatever information I can gather about the state > of Outline View in LibreOffice Writer. I just finished spending over an hour reading the entire 12-year history from the link on your stub, Jean-Marc. Many people saying the same as me. Two comments seemed important to me. One was #202 by liotier, commenting on what an epiphany it is for people that he teaches to use an outliner. I find the same reaction--that when I teach others to use it, they are forever grateful. Liotier says, "This is a recurring theme in collecting user requirements: 19th century people don't want a car - they want a faster horse. Just because the majority of users don't know they need an outliner doesn't mean is would not be useful to them." Liotier seems to me to have put his finger on the whole problem. For anyone who knows how to use an outliner, it quickly becomes essential. For the rest of the population, there's no demand because they've never tried it. My guess is that includes many of the LO and OO developers. Hey, people! We don't want a faster horse! We want a car! Just this year, james flowerdew made another comment, #232, which is also pointed at the problem. He wrote "Free software that only half replaces paid software is actually aiding it's paid competitors." Finally, I'd like to quote Liotier, because he worked in software production for 20 years. "But from twenty years of writing as a software projects manager, I can testify that word processing productivity and well-structured documents are strongly correlated to the use of the outline mode." I also worked in software development, though not as long, as a senior technical writer at Fujitsu. My past comments were about the issue of enhancing creativity and ease of organizing for a nontechnical writer, because that's what I am now. But as a technical writer, I also found it crucial for writing well-structured technical documents, particularly since I was tasked to writing developer guides in a language that I barely knew. (I wrote a jdbc class for one of my guides which I considered a crowning achievement, because it was immediately implemented by sales engineers.) I also used to write everything in M$Word, and then when it was fully vetted, I'd import it into Framemaker, which I also hooked up to print the API directly from the javadocs, and I did my editing and writing of the javadocs in Word using the outliner, and then used macros to format them for insertion into the code. The outliner was absolutely essential to doing my job as a top technical writer. I do not understand why this has been an open issue for 12 years. -- You are receiving this mail because: You are the assignee for the bug.
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