https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=94175
--- Comment #7 from bmenant <bmen...@menant-benjamin.fr> ---
Hi there,
A relative (willing to adopt FOSS) recently asked me how to enable the
Thumbnails Pane within LibreOffice. She’s preparing herself for a three years
long research work; LO would be her daily tool to write a hundreds of pages
paper.
At first, I thought the Navigator pane was what she’s looking for. Turned out
it wasn’t; she explained why she’s really missing that thumbnails overview.
1. The way she writes stuff. Some people starts to define a fairly accurate
outline of their document, by putting down sections names, chapters titles,
headings, etc. Other like to write content beforehand. They write a couple of
paragraphs, move it around, cut, merge, edit... and so on until it’s good
enough. I guess either way is fine, it’s just a matter of how you actually
think, work and write.
In such case, certainly more than ever, one needs to go back and forth between
its content shreds. Whereas the navigator pane is out of order, the thumbnails
pane comes in handy.
2. The big picture. It’s hard to scan and hard to not focus too much on the
details when you’re writing. Does that section is long enough compared to the
previous one? Does this paragraph look too packed? How many titles are there in
this page? Those instant feedbacks overview provides give important feeling to
the author.
This point makes me think of code editors and minimaps features. It’s really
convenient when it comes to browse a thousands lines script. The topography the
shape of the code creates helps to visually memorize location of functions.
Nevertheless, I taught her how to properly structure documents using predefined
heading levels, and how the navigator reflects documents outline and provides
convenient ways to edit sections level on the go. She quickly took it in. I’m
pretty confident she’ll never work with word processor the way she used to.
Still, I’m sure a basic thumbnails pane would be very useful to many users,
just like mini-maps have become so popular on many code editors.
Hope it’ll help,
Benjamin.
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