https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=38262

Bob <[email protected]> changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
           Priority|low                         |high

--- Comment #12 from Bob <[email protected]> ---
Bug 68167 has far more detailed discussion and references, and very
specifically explanation of why minor fixes to navigator will _not_ cut it. If
68167 is to be marked as a duplicate of this, then the importance level (high)
needs to be transferred as well - which I'm going to attempt to do, but I
probably don't have the required karma.

I would like to add my very strong support to this RFE (yes, sorry, I realise
it's quite old, but I didn't find it till now). I teach a course on technical
writing (I'm a CS professor, but you teaches what you gets). As far as
possible, the course is based on free software. 

Just as in software, any complex document needs a design/implementation cycle.
That implies a need for good tools to support the design process (the analogue
of UML and other design tools for programming). Well-designed word-processing
documents - at least technical ones - are tree-structured, so the design
process requires a good tree-structuring tool: one that supports the editing of
the document structure at the 'ideas' level prior to and during writing, and
does so in an intuitive, easy-to-use way. MS Word outline mode is excellent for
this. For all that I love all the other aspects of LibreOffice, Navigator just
doesn't cut it. So at the moment, I have to lamely tell my students 'beg or
borrow a copy of MS Word, or use jreepad, to do the document structuring, then
switch to LibreOffice'. Of course, you can guess how far my free software
evangelism gets with that...

Incremental changes to Navigator aren't what's needed. For all the reasons
argued at 68167, and before that on the OO links, implementing this requires a
complete new design, to properly support editing document tree structures. It
needs to be simple and natural to use, as MS Word outline mode is. Without such
a redesign, Writer cannot be a proper tool for designing and building large
documents: it will remain an editor rather than a document IDE (think vi versus
eclipse). To my mind this missing functionality is by far the biggest issue
with Writer, or indeed the whole of LibreOffice. And it's the biggest danger to
LibreOffice - if OO implemented this first, it would be the one thing that
would force me to switch. I'm sure I'm not alone in this.

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