Alan Mackenzie wrote:

>Open Office 1.1.3 on Debian "Sarge" GNU/Linux, Gnome 2.8.3.

I realize that the official motto of Debian is "We will
release no code before its time".

OOo 1.1.3 is several years old. I'd recommend upgrading to
OOo 2.2.1. If you don't have the hardware requirements to
run that, then upgrade to OOo 1.1.5 security-patch.

> When I click on "help" I get the following rude message:
>"The requested document does not exist in the database !!".

That is the default message when OOo can not find a file it
needs, to respond to a user request.

> (i) I asked for help, not for a "document";

The help file is a document.

>I would, at the very least, expect the message to tell me the name of the 
>missing file

And create additional obstacles for the l10n/i18n teams?
OOo is an extremely difficult program to localize.  [There
is are a number of solid reasons why it is suggested that
l10n teams have lots of experience with other projects,
before tackling OOo.) Inflicting static paths (that are
wrong far more often than they are right) is going to
compound their problems, and confuse everybody except those
few individuals on the platform and localization for which
those strings have been frozen for.

> Could somebody please tell me what file I'm missing?

The most common reason for the omission of the help file, is
that it has not been translated into the language that the
UI is in.

The second most common reason for them not being included,
is that they weren't ready when the program was built.

> "acm-bold" fails to appear there.  I can't apply that style to any text.
> That seems to me to be a bug.

Assuming that the style selection box you are referring to
is the one in the formatting toolbar, it would be a major
bug if it displayed anything other than paragraph styles.

If, OTOH, you meant the drop down box in Stylist, then you
need to switch to character styles, and then switch to
either "hierarchical styles" or "all styles", after
selecting "character styles".

IF, OTOH, you were manually formatting things using the
toolbar, then if it affected anything other than the
highlighted text, it would be a major bug.

>though how to use this style is currently a mystery.

is this a numbering style, character style, or paragraph
that you managed to create, without knowing how to use?

>This seems to me to be another bug.

Character styles only affect the characters to which they
are applied.  They should not affect anything that uses the
same paragraph style as the paragraph style that is being
overwritten by the character style that is being applied.

To call that behaviour a bug, is to totally misunderstand
styles.

> Sometimes, when I apply "acm-normal" to some text, OO decides that I
> don't really want the font I asked for, but "Lucidabright" instead.  This

Either you are attempting to use fonts that have not been
installed in the system, or have configured some fonts to be
replaced by LucidaBright, or you are not applying the style
that you think you are, or any combination thereof.

>this program feels like an early beta version - I would be grateful for being 
>persuaded I'm
> mistaken here.  I'm hoping that it's only buggy in those few areas I've
> tried to use and works fine otherwise.  


> just want to be a user, get my (urgent) editing done as soon as possible,

My suggestion is that you sit down and spend roughly 100
hours learning how to use styles. [Everything you learnt
about styles from using WordPerfect, and Microsoft Office is
wrong. Neither of those programs have a clue as to what
styles are, much less how to implement them.] If you learnt
how to use styles from using TeX, or DocBook, then there are
a couple of things that are radically different in OOo.

xan

jonathon

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