https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=90887
Bug ID: 90887
Summary: Outline suggestion
Product: LibreOffice
Version: unspecified
Hardware: Other
OS: All
Status: UNCONFIRMED
Severity: normal
Priority: medium
Component: Writer
Assignee: [email protected]
Reporter: [email protected]
This isn't a bug report, it is a suggestion for what I would consider an
improvement to the Writer component of Libre Office. Many years ago I bought a
package of CD's that had educational tutorials, it was back in the days of
Windows 95, so a long time ago.
In this package was a program called Term Paper, which was to help the student
write outlines for Term Papers and such. When I am writing an outline, and
with many others I would assume as well, I like to whip up the outline with all
it's levels and sub-levels quickly, and then fill in the details in a block of
un-numbered text under it later. And, to minimize distraction of having too
many levels of the outline open as well as keeping the outline from stretching
out over a number of pages when working on it, I like to have the ability to
collapse or hide the descriptive text for all the outline items except the one
I am working on - yet have the ability to open any other item as well if I need
to refer to it for some reason.
The 'Term Paper' software worked exactly like this. You could whip up the
outline with all levels and sublevels quickly, and then have one/multiple/all
levels open depending on how you wanted to work. I thought this was a
wonderful way to outline, and I would like to see a similar functionality in
Writer. Yes, I know that there are lots of outline programs out there, many of
them free - single pane, double pane, etc. But I have been unable to find one
that worked in quite this way before.
Also, I think adding in this functionality to Writer would greatly enhance it's
usability to the everyday user, and make Libre Office that much more appealing
and useful to everyday users. As it stands, from what I have been able to
learn from reading/posting in user forums, this might or might not be possible,
if you're going to do it you have to do this or that complicated change to
fields or study up on how to create your own fields - which in addition to
burning up a lot of time learning to code that an everyday user just probably
isn't going to want to spend on an office suite package. Not to mention once
you get someone who doesn't know what they're doing in there mucking about with
things like this you have the danger of messing up your entire install and
having to re-install all over again. You can maybe possibly do it, according
to what some say in the user support forums, using hidden text but it is a big
complicated mess as well - and after you do get it to working it is an all or
nothing proposition, either all hidden text viewed and your list accordian's
out like a roman scroll, or everything is collapsed.
So, I am just wondering how hard it would be to actually build this
functionality into Writer. This was an old small program that did not take up
much disk space at all, just a couple of kilobytes in size. I don't know if
that would mean it would be a relatively easy function to add into Writer, or
if in today's coding environment it would mean a huge chunk of code would have
to be written and integrated into the package.
But, if it wouldn't be too hard to add this into Writer, I think it would be a
very useful tool for users who do a lot of outlining. Thanks.
--
You are receiving this mail because:
You are the assignee for the bug.
_______________________________________________
Libreoffice-bugs mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/libreoffice-bugs
