Jallan wrote:
Robin Laing wrote:
Fair enough ... but myself and others have indicated that we feel that
it overkill to include every possible change of format in one dialog box.
If you ran into the problems that I have, then this wouldn't be
classified as overkill. It is the same problem with MS Word as well,
not just OOo.
If you want to know where formatting changes, do a Search for a
particular format attribute, and you will find each place where that
attribute appears. (There are a unfortunately a few attributes that you
can't search on.)
Not very productive when working on large documents created from
mutiple sources.
Perhaps separate tool bars for page formatting, paragraph formatting,
and character formatting would be better, and separate tool bars for
each of the five style panels. You could bring all the tool bars up if
you wanted. You probably wouldn't want to very often.
The Active Styles feature does help here, but it doesn't' display
where the changes take place with respect to the text.
=====
A false accusation. I have expressed several times in this thread my
desire for improvements in the OpenOffice interface. So have others. And
we have provided details of what could be done. No-one is entirely
satisfied, and probably never will be. Things can always be improved,
according to someone's viewpoint.
From the thread this is the indication that I get from many that
don't even want to look at what I say is an improvement.
You arguments comes across as: "because you don't totally support my
idea, you are against any interface improvements in OOo Writer".
I will agree that is the way I feel. It is my pig headedness, and my
wife will agree with you on this one. :)
As to the "idea of Open Source software", one of the virtues of open
source software is that people can use it as they wish without cost and
modify it freely. But if you, yourself, want any open source software
modified a particular, then do it yourself, or get others to modify it
either by persuading them that they ought to implement the ideas that
you want to see, or by paying someone to do it.
That you think your idea is good, doesn't mean that anyone has any
obligation to implement it or even think about it.
Those who donate their time or money or both to such projects call the
tune. Of course, mostly these people do listen to users and are users
themselves. But not all users agree and it is not the users who make the
decisions. The users are not the bosses.
Open source software does not even have to be market driven in many
cases. Developers can do whatever they want to do. NeoOffice is a case
in point.
My wife uses NeoOffice on her Mac. FWIW, she wants a RC code feature
as well. She has the same headaches of multiple imported formats to
get into one nice document. Sometimes hundreds of pages in size.
Moving a cursor character to character to find where the formatting
has changed has been enough to cause her to scream.
Good for them. So what is the problem? No application can be everything
for everyone. Many people want to stick with exactly what they are used
to, and within a product stick to exactly the way they have always done
things, even when shown better ways.
I agree here and this is the issue with people that are moving from WP
to OOo, sometimes because they don't have a choice. Adding a function
to OOo that makes it more functional to those users, even if it isn't
the same as RC but also a tool that would help other users should
never be frowned on.
LaTex certainly is better than OOo Writer for some tasks. And I would be
surprised if Word Perfect is not also better than OOo Writer for
particular tasks and probably generally less buggy. And all these
products share much of the same functionality.
Personally, as a user, I find the current interface good enough that I
can quickly find what is wrong when things are wrong, and I'd rather
developers spent time on bugs and enhancements that are particularly
important to *me*.
But every user has different priorities.
Again, this is important. This is why the lines are so divided on
this issue. My priorities are way different than those that only
write for a living. I write as a very small part of my job. I very
very rarely create original documents. I am normally stuck with
either repairing crashed MS Office documents or combining pieces from
so many different sources and formats. Many that get imported in
weird and wonderful ways. I will say that things have been much
better with OOo 2.0 on this front.
The attributes supplied by styles can be overwritten by user-applied
direct formatting, and in some cases by other user applied styles. We
know this.
And these can be hard to find. A RC style viewer or at least reveal
formatting points may make life much better in these cases for people
like me.
But you can usually see on the screen whether attribute changes take
place before or after a space if you turn on View -> Nonprinting
characters and look at the dot that represents the space. It's small,
but usually clear enough when comparing two spaces on either side of a
word whether the style of the two spaces match.
If it's not clear, though it usually is, you have the font name, font
size, and three separate attributes of the current characters at the top
of the window. And you can add other character attribute buttons to the
current toolbar or a toolbar of your own if you want. I don't recall
ever having trouble easily finding out whether an attribute changes
before or after a particular space, when I cared about it.
And I am the kind of niggler who does are about such things. The spaces
around a word or section of text in boldface should also be bold. I've
even jiggered with changing the font widths on spaces following italic
text to increase the spacing for better appearance.
Your the type of person that causes me headaches. When I import a
document, I sometimes have to remove some of the formatting or insert
text within this formatting and spend time trying to figure out what
went wrong. Now this is where RC would indicate that there was a
change for that space.
As to whether a character *style* changes, just press F11 and look at
the highlighted names in the character style listing in the Stylist. But
you don't *want* to do that. Fair enough. But I don't really *want* one
single dialog box filling the screen with irrelevancies about paragraph
indents and paragraph spacing and over 30 paragraph formatting features
when I'm working with characters.
I tried the non-printing character suggestion and it will work if the
changes are obvious enough. That is an interesting suggestion but you
have to either have your zoom up enough or very keen eyes, better than
mine. :) Now if there was a figure that showed that there was a
formatting change, much better.
So if you make such an error, press CTRL-Z, move back or forward one
space, and insert your text again. Then fix the space also if you want.
This is hardly worth fussing over. You don't have to know or care what
the wrong formatting was. Just fix it and move on.
But I didn't do this, undo won't work for me. I received the document
from someone else.
I don't know what you mean by "I cannot paste it within the style". If
you want the attributes of the pasted text to remain, then do a normal
paste. If you want the attributes of the passage into which you are
pasting the text to take precedence, do Paste Special and choose
"Unformatted text". If you have another problem, then explain what your
problem is.
Fair comment. I have tried to past text within a style but kept
missing the end style pointer on my paste. Sometimes pasting within
the document and then moving the end text. Lost productivity.
You are obviously having problems. So provide details of one at least of
the problems, not undetailed references to things that don't work the
way you are trying to make them work. The interface you describe won't
help in such matters, as it still wouldn't show anything that is not
seeable now by looking at the formatting dialog boxes for the current
object.
The example I have used is verticle text in an imported document. I
spent two or three days trying to get it sorted out. I never did. I
ended up having to use Word.
And another that I have is "Flashing Text" The style is Header 1
which is used many times in this document. This is the only one that
flashes. Now I do know that the author has used allot of direct
formatting within this document because if I apply the Header 1 style,
it will change the look of line. This is where a different style
should have been used. Now if I could only fully reformat the
document. Not an option though.
I'd like those dialog boxes improved by just making them non-modal. I'd
like also to see the underlying style formatting also in those boxes.
I'd like lots of improvements.
But meanwhile, I honestly don't find slows me down noticeably. The
formatting at any point is usually obvious without opening these
dialogs, and I can use the formatting broom to select formatting from
one place and paste it over another without worrying about what the
formatting is, if I don't want to.
I do agree but the Reveal Codes has been brought up so many times over
the years.
I have messages from 2003 on this. The RC issue was created in
2002-Mar-07.
I will acknowledge that a "Full" RC implementation is not possible
within OOo. But a compromise that allows a more readable and handy
indication of property changes is achievable. The benefit of
discussion is options open to how things can be achieved.
Yes. But if others have different ideas about what is better ... ?
And I rather expect that many of your WP users wouldn't care at all for
your idea.
No doubt but an option that provide a closer to WP tool for formatting
information would be a start in the right direction. The solution is
in the software. Any Reveal Codes dialog must, and I do agree must,
be written on top of the main OOo operation. This is part of the
OpenDocument format that must be recognized. Now there is talk of WP
supporting ODF, it will be interesting how they deal with this issue.
They want a reveal code mode that allows them to see and *edit* code
tokens directly and nothing less, not a screen-filling dialog which
would mostly show attributes not applicable to the current situation.
Jallan
Any things that I think of from these discussions that are helpful to
the development of a RC type interface, I will post to the RFE (3395).
=====
I will be away from my desk for a few days so I will be out of this
loop for that time. I will be reading this thread and hopefully learn
more and more about the OOo formatting. I will be looking at the code
and see what I can find out. Of course it all depends on time.
--
Robin Laing
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