Bug 79877

Seconded. The inline method is awkward and obscures the nature what you're actually doing - as someone who's had to work with the Word implementation for years now I must say LO's old popup method was vastly preferable.

That said, I really don't want to give the impression that I think the current situation is anywhere near as bad as it is in Word. Only being able to put text in the field with no in-field formatting allowed still saves me a world of headache and I'm still generally able to easily tell where one field ends and another begins.

I've seen some discussion elsewhere about possibly making double-clicking on an input field bring up the old popup, but a preference that could be turned on and off would probably be better for the mouse buttons and fingers of people who will ordinarily use that method rather than inline.

Can you confirm that this worked in LibreOffice 4.1.x ? If it is the MS Office compatible text fields work that was done way back in the 3.x series.
And/or can you attach a simple sample document with idiot-user instructions: "move the cursor to here", "type XYZ" etc. that has this feature working as you like it in 4.1.x ?
Thanks.

Hi Michael,

Thanks very much for taking a look at this!

(In reply to Michael Meeks from comment #3)
> Can you confirm that this worked in LibreOffice 4.1.x?

Yes, this worked perfectly in 4.1.x and all prior versions. We've been using Libreoffice since its first official release, and Openoffice prior to that, since version 1.0 was released. I honestly don't remember when 'Input fields' were introduced or when we started using them, all I know is that we have been using them for a very long time - I'd have to say at least since about 2003 or so.

> If it is the MS Office compatible text fields work that
> was done way back in the 3.x series.

This is definitely not that - here is the bug responsible for this new inline editing of Input Fields (again, introduced in 4.2):

https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=33737

So...

>= 4.2 introduced the new 'Inline Editing' method for editing Input Fields, which is the way Word has always worked.

<= 4.1.x edits existing Input Fields in the same pop-up dialog that, incidentally, is still used in 4.2+ when populating them the very first time (it cycles through them all, then the dialog closes), when creating a new document from one of the templates.

I understand the desire that people have for doing it this way, and in fact, I have come around to not hating it, but I still prefer the old way, hence this bug/enhancement request.

> And/or can you attach a simple sample document with idiot-user instructions:
> "move the cursor to here", "type XYZ" etc. that has this feature working as
> you like it in 4.1.x ?

Certainly, but it will just be a simple one for demonstration purposes (our forms mostly have confidential info in them). We have dozens of forms (saved as templates - ie, .ott) with lots of Input Fields (some with 30 or more) that were created many years ago, and have never had a problem with them until the 4.2.x series.

Thanks very much again Michael for taking a look at this, even if it is just to confirm it...

Created attachment 107260 [details]
Simple Template illustrating the bug

Simple Template illustrating the bug (inability to paste into an Input Field) and other problems with the new Inline Editing feature

*** Bug 75319 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Oh, one more thing...

I would be perfectly happy if, instead of an option, a new 'feature' was added that allowed the user to open the pop-up dialog for a field by simply dbl-clicking the field.

Maybe this would be much easier than having to deal with the code required to add an option that could be enabled/disabled?

Ok...

The new in-line editing of Input Fields feature was apparently inherited/pulled from Apache Openoffice.

Atila created an issue for this for Apache Openoffice, and the developer there who was responsible for the new in-line editing feature appears to be interested ini adding this new feature to allow for dbl-clicking a field to pop-up the old field editor. He also is interested in adding a new 'Previous' button to work in conjunction with the 'Next' button, to allow for cycling through the fields in both directions. I added my comments and thoughts there, so hopefully this will get fixed there:

https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=125108