Dotan,
In a message dated 2010.06.10 14:10 -0500, Dotan Cohen wrote:
... you can separate sections of a document by page breaks, with
each section having its own language or topical focus. ... the
spreadsheet analogy is imperfect, precisely because the sheets are
/not/ separate documents. (Usually there are functional
relationships between sheets.)
Yes, but my three resumes are three different documents. They should
each start their page numbering from 1, for instance. And I should be
able to print them by simply clicking print, without having to check
the start and stop page for each.
Ah, yes. The page numbering, document structure (outline, etc) and all
other document-specific traits /are/ essential to your "separate
sheets", like the editing environment elements (below) - IOW, as you
say, exactly like separate documents. And yet one can see some use for
these as functionally-linked documents, analogous to sheets of a
spreadsheet.
Before, I thought the essential elements of your "separate sheets" proposal
related to the filing and editing environment:
- each "sheet" having its own editing state (cursors, etc - as for separate
documents), unaffected by editing of other sheets (unless you had an
enhanced content linkage between sheets - such as, say, language
translation, paragraph by paragraph);
- all "sheets" sharing a super-editing state, with sheet selection via tabs
(as in the spreadsheet case), with all sheets/documents loaded together from
the same file.
Were those not the essential elements?
Those would be very desirable features, yes. Think of it this way, why
does Calc need separate sheets? What does this allow the user to do?
Wouldn't you like to do that in Writer as well?
Calc needs separate sheets for different reasons. Examples:
- I often do multi-sheet engineering calculations where different
sheets are different parts of the calculation, subject to (among other
things) different formatting - hence different sheets. In a text
document, OTOH, you can change page formatting by changing pages,
paragraph formatting by changing paragraphs, etc.
- At other times formatting may not change but you use the separate
sheets to provide an extra dimension to your calculation: With each
sheet limited to two dimensions, representing three independent inputs
(to take a common example) is often best done by using separate sheets
for the third dimension. I don't think a text document translates
readily to such multi-variable problems.
Still, there's no reason to think that a text document might not have
its own reasons for separate "sheets" (documents) in a file, and I think
you have presented some persuasively.
John
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