OOo documents look different

[Erwin Rol]

On Mon, 2006-07-10 at 20:26 +0200, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> Le lundi 10 juillet 2006 à 13:44 -0400, Benjy Grogan a écrit :
> > On 7/10/06, Nicolas Mailhot <nicolas.mailhot at laposte.net> wrote:
> 
> > > The sad thing is people don't care about what you're asking - if they
> > > did word processing would not have rolled over DTP in the last decade.
> > > In a word processing context all you have is a text flow (as in
> > > free-flow).
> > 
> > People do care.  I've heard this complaint before.  It's not a concern
> > when a 27 page document becomes a 28 page document, but when you want
> > to have 1 page and suddenly that 1 page has become 2 pages and you're
> > searching for what OS it last fit properly on, then it gets to be a
> > nuisance.
> 
> Well, they don't care enough to buy DTP products, which means word is
> the only game in town, and writer is just emulating it.
> 
> > I'd be happy with a set of fonts that work the same on all OSes, and
> > then I'd stick with those.  Times New Roman seems like a hassle now.
> 
> Even with a single common font you'd have problems :
> - some other parts of the formatting will have fuzzy definition
> interpreted slightly differently over time by different software
> versions.
> - every system won't interpret the same font the same way (currently
> Fedora won't use the bytecode interpreter because of patent concerns,
> Windows will)
> - fonts are not static : they include instructions for the rendering
> engines, and as rendering engines get smarter font designers include
> more complex instructions, which mean display and print approach
> progressively the font designer ideal, but the size of a given text
> string will change as a result.

those are all technical reasons, here we (with we I mean software
developers, and that includes me) are trying again to find a excuse to
not make what the user wants. I would dare to bet with you that most
users expect their ODF (or DOC) documents to look the same even if they
open them 5 years later with a new version of OOo or Word (of course for
some documents they might say "oh well strange that it is now 26 instead
of 25 pages, but of well, probably just a little bug in my new version
of Word").

> The page change the poster is complaining about is due to Fedora
> honoring some font settings it ignored before.

What ever the reason is, the software's way of working changed in a bad
way, so this "fix" did not fix anything it broke things. 

> Right now the only game in town if you don't use a DTP-like product with
> transparent fit-to-frame scaling is to reserve enough blank space on the
> page to account to the slight rendering variations between office
> suites.

Not an option for multi-page documents. BTW differently rendered
multi-page documents can be very confusing too, for example think about
a meeting where 3 ppl open a document, one on a mac, one on windows one
on XP, and than say; "Now all look at page 25 where you will see ...."
good luck finding out where the text is that is shown on page 25 by one
of the ppl.

For me, not rendering documents correct in a word processing application
is a _fatal_ bug. Changing the way old documents are rendered is even
more fatal. Copying this behavior from Microsoft (if Word even has that
behavior which i would not dare to bet about!) is not a good thing to
do. 

But since i have no idea how to fix it, I will not continue to bug ppl
with it. And sounding by the arguments on why it is displaying documents
incorrect it seems OOo is just broken by design, so there is nothing
easy to fix in the first place. 

- Erwin