OOo documents look different

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Le lundi 10 juillet 2006 à 20:54 +0200, Erwin Rol a écrit :
> On Mon, 2006-07-10 at 20:26 +0200, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:

> > 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. 

If bad = it changed just freeze your hardware and software and nothing
bad will ever happen to you.

> > 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. 

"Frame" in a DTP context can extend on several pages

> 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 ...."

This is why read-only formats like pdf exist

> good luck finding out where the text is that is shown on page 25 by one
> of the ppl.

This is why all serious writers use lawyer-style continuous numbering 

> For me, not rendering documents correct in a word processing application
> is a _fatal_ bug. 

Either you can use static documents and pdf will be fine for you and you
want editable documents.

Now consider this :
1. you have a document saved on X pages
2. several years later, office suite opens it and recognizes it was
saved on X pages, so even it it would have rendered it by itself on Y
pages it scales it to X pages
3. user starts typing. Now what. Should the suite disable scaling? Try
to keep the document on X pages, continuously scaling? At which point
should it disable scaling? Can't make a good decision, because it does
not know if the user cares more about the page number or the font
size/line spacing/word spacing (and some institutions mandate a
particular font size). This is basically a no-win can't-secondguess-user
situation

In DTP-like scaling is explicitly requested by the users which makes it
safe.

If you want scaling in OO.o it needs to be explicit too to work
(probably in format/page/fit on X pages and apply to whole document or
section only).

Good luck getting it implemented - the OO.o guys are so busy cleaning up
the old staroffice code and getting feature-parity with office features
office lacks are very low on their agenda

> 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.

Word has this behaviour too because it's impossible to implement sanely
without user hints, and even with them it's non-trivial.

Sure users expect something else. Users expect the behaviour of print
output without the static nature of printout. Users expect magic. That's
now how software works. -ENOTELEPATHY

> But since i have no idea how to fix it, I will not continue to bug ppl
> with it.

At least bug people the right way by opening a bug in OO.o issuezilla
and writing an implementation spec.

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot
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