On Thursday 15 May 2014 09:03:13 PM Jim McLaughlin wrote: > the overwhelming majority of posters appear to desire the > WP/Corel "Reveal Codes" option
Really? I don't mean to be contentious, but I didn't see an overwhelming majority on either side. > If the programmers behind OO want to provide a word processor which will > attract users, and avoid the very high costs of the MJKS or Corel products, > those programmers might want to seriously consider the efficacy of > providing what the users who have expressed an opinion appear to want, > rather tahn take the "...my way or the highway..." approach expresseed here > so far. All major office suites, including WordPefect, are most efficient when styles are used. OpenOffice Writer is an extreme example of using styles, but that's also what makes it so powerful. And for some people, like the writers of technical manuals, styles are absolutely essential for their work. Writer does allow you to format manually, if you really insist. In fact, some innovations, such as the sidebar, chiefly aid manually formatting. However, I would hate, for example, to create a table of contents without heading styles; I would have to go through the entire document and create each entry one at a time, instead of having them ready to use when I want the TOC. But you can only accommodate people's unwillingness to learn or to help themselves so far. You wouldn't expect to sit down and play a game without learning how it was structured, so why would you expect to do so with an office suite? Beyond a certain point, people have to help themselves. If people don't want to learn how to use Writer the way it was designed, they might be better off with some simpler tool. AbiWord might be a good choice for such people; it's one of the few word processors I know that might be said to be oriented towards manual formatting. > Is there a technical reason why a Corel/WP "Reveal Codes" function can not > be implemented in 5.x.x? See my previous post about past discussions of the subject. One potential problem is that unlike WordPerfect, OpenOffice doesn't store information in a single file. An OpenOffice file is really a collection of several compressed files. Under these circumstances, a Reveal Code feature is not impossible, but it is more complicated than in WordPerfect. It means another way for files to corrupt as information passes back and forth between the actual files and the Reveal Code Screen, and would be high maintenance, since every new feature would require revisions to it. I don't speak for anyone except myself. However, given that there is a lot to do already with maintaining and cleaning the aging code, I doubt that developers would make Reveal Codes a high priority unless there was a lot more enthusiasm that has been shown so far. -- Bruce Byfield 604-421-7189 (on Pacific time) blog: https://brucebyfield.wordpress.com website: http://members.axion.net/~bbyfield/ ------------------------------------------- List Conduct Guidelines: http://openoffice.apache.org/list-conduct.html To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscr...@openoffice.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: users-h...@openoffice.apache.org
