Description
Albrecht Müller
2014-08-25 19:06:24 UTC
Hi Albrecht, thanks for reporting. I understand you 'pain' and problem. F1 > Search for Outline / chapter does give clear guidance. And the other way round: one knowing Writer and incidentally confronted with that other application, will find himself stuck too.. So .. I don't know.. Indeed maybe a visual hint?? Created attachment 105319 [details]
List Style window showing the Options tab.
Created attachment 105320 [details]
ad 2) List Style window showing Outline tab.
Created attachment 105321 [details]
ad 3) Proposal for changes in the List Style window.
Created attachment 105322 [details]
ad 4) Paragraph Style window showing Outline & Numbering tab, controls enabled
Created attachment 105323 [details]
ad 5) Paragraph Style window showing Outline & Numbering tab, controls disabled
Created attachment 105324 [details]
ad 6) Example of help information
Created attachment 105325 [details]
ad 7) The outline numbering window that should have been used.
Created attachment 105326 [details]
ad 8) Proposal: Add a button in the Styles & Formatting window
Created attachment 105327 [details]
ad 9) Proposal: Add a button in Outline & Numbering tab of the Paragraph Style window
I tried to give a few visual hints in the attachments, note there is an attachment for each point to illustrate it. Assumption: If you want to change any style or formatting, you can do this using the Styles and Formatting window. If you think that is true you are lost: You cannot handle the important special case of outline numbering this way. Not knowing this exception you may try the following: 1) Define a list style that reflects the outline numbering. 2) Be careful, you may ruin your carefully designed list style just by pressing a cursor movement key in some other tab. No clicking necessary! So another rule of thumb - using the cursor keys just moves the focus and does not change anything - does not work. You may not even notice the changes you did as you will not see what the actual style looks like unless you go to the "Position" or "Options" tab. There are various markers in the different tabs so it is not clear what their meaning is. 3) Proposal: The Numbering Style window should always show how the style looks like. For this purpose a combination of the visualisations used in the "Position" and "Options" tabs is moved outside of the tabbed area into a new "Preview" part. 4) Now you have a numbering style and you can use this style to define the paragraph styles for your headings. The "Outline & Numbering" tab seems to be the right place to do this. Looks good, you get your headlines numbered, but not in the way you expected. This mechanisms seems to be completely broken, e.g. the numbering does not care about the outline level. 5) Occasionally you may encounter an outline style that works. But how do you change the numbering as the relevant controls are disabled? 6) You can try the help button. The kind of information you get is not really useful. So far there was no hint that there is something special about outline numbering. What you experience is just a broken functionality and broken help information. So how could you get the idea to search for "outline" in the help function? 7) The problem is that there is no hint to the tool you should use to get the outline numbered. Btw: Why does the outline numbering tool use the caption “Character”? 8) Therefore it would be helpful to place an additional button in the "Styles and Formatting" window that opens the right window. 9) The "Outline & Numbering" tab should also contain a button with the same functionality. I consider the proposals given above just as some crude workarounds that could improve the user interface with modest implementation effort. Just a remark to "that other application": An office suite is very complex piece of software, and I think there is not a single person that is really familiar with each and every part of it, be it LibreOffice or "that other application". From time to time, you will therefore visit areas of the application that are unknown to you. In these cases the way how the user interface guides you through the unknown areas can make a difference of many hours of work. So problems in the user interface can be very expensive if working time has monetary value. That is why I consider this kind of problems very important. Now that I think I understand how the outline numbering works, I can try to find out why LibreOffice treats some, but not all header styles as plain text when it imports a rtf file while a very old version of MS word is able to interpret the formats correctly. I fear I will not be able to produce a bug report about this: I am not sure if I will be able to reproduce the problem in a way suitable for a bug report. Maybe Writer behaves as intended, as there is some switch "treat outline levels 3 and 4 as default style" which I inadvertently turned on a year ago, and I just did not yet find the checkbox to disable it :-( PS: I had this text in WordPad and wanted to run the spelling checker of LibreOffice. Simple idea: Open LibreOffice Writer with an empty document, set language “For all Text” to “English (UK)” and copy the text from WordPad into the empty Writer document. Result is: I see a single line of text in a header line at the top of the page. Ok, I can use Edit --> Paste special --> Unformatted text and I get what I want. So I do not bother writing a bug report about this. A user that is not aware that there is something like "Paste special" may loose quite some time trying to figure out how to get this work done. thanks :) Pls note, in some situations you need different outline-styles (e.g. the default Tools > Outline numbering + one handled via the Outline tab of a paragraph style). Ergo: there is not just one outline style. (In reply to comment #11) > Btw: Why does the outline numbering tool use the > caption “Character”? A bug, definitely. (In reply to comment #12) > thanks :) > Pls note, in some situations you need different outline-styles (e.g. the > default Tools > Outline numbering + one handled via the Outline tab of a > paragraph style). > Ergo: there is not just one outline style. It is clear to me that there is more than one outline style. But there are two different categories, and the proposed additional button in the "Styles and Formatting" is intended to reflect this. My current understanding is: a) The first category is the outline style you define by Tools -> Outline Numbering. There is only one style in this category, and this is not a kind of default style for category b). This is the only style that is bound to the outline levels that are used to structure a document and which are the basis for creating the table of contents. You can specify this level in the "Outline & Numbering" tab of the "Paragraph Style" window, provided that you do not include this paragraph style into outline numbering. In this case you cannot use the "Styles and Formatting" mechanism as the necessary controls in the "Outline & Numbering" tab are disabled. You can have no more than one paragraph style per outline level. This mechanism serves to structure a document and makes sure that the document uses a single common outline style, that headings at the same outline level use the same paragraph style etc. b) It is possible to define an arbitrary number of list styles. Every list style is also an outline style. That is why I think the proposed common style preview makes sense. List styles use an outline level that is independent of the level you specify in the "Outline & Numbering" tab. In many cases only the first level is used. Therefore the fact that the list style is actually an outline style is not apparent. You change the relevant outline level using the tab or shift tab keys when the cursor is at the start of the paragraph. This kind of outline level is not relevant for the table of contents. It is used for various structured and unstructured lists within a document, but not for structuring the document itself. Note: Every paragraph can have up to two independent outline levels, one for each category. Another source for confusion are the various bugs in outline handling. When I see some behaviour I do not understand, it is hard for me to distinguish between intended behaviour and a bugs. Analysing bug 68590 I found a situation I did not encounter before: In the "Outline & Numbering" tab the "Outline Level" control is disabled, but not the "Numbering Style" control. Look, what happens when you try to insert a table of contents (include all levels!) Importing rtf documents with outline information also gives strange effects. In the example I created for bug 83204 all headers loose their outline information. In real life examples they may loose this information for certain outline levels only (in my case level 2 and 3 were affected). So I feel it is pretty hard to understand the concepts behind outline numbering. Hi Albrecht, First my apologies that I - though I did ask some questions - fail to confirm the issue and set to new. I lack the time to _seriously_ (with all knowledge and options around this area) comment and handle. So I have to leave it to others.. (In reply to comment #15) > .. > So I feel it is pretty hard to understand the concepts behind outline > numbering. Understanding some of your concerns/problems, I do not understand this. Use Heading 1, Heading 2 etc. etc, in the document and set the desired numbering for the various levels in Tools > Outline numbering. Then Insert > Index and Tables > Index... for the TOC. Covers 95%+ of cases, AFAIAA. Regards, Cor Maybe it's an idea to change the summary from User interface for outline numbering is confusing to User interface for outline numbering is confusing with possibilities offered both at Format>Paragraph ... Outline numbering and at Tools>Outline numbering ?? Hi Cor, You may be right when you assume that in 95%+ of cases the concepts of outline numbering don't cause any problems. You can go the way you describe, get what you want, and don't have to worry about the concepts of outline numbering. The story behind this error report may clarify things: I had a RTF report generated from an UML tool and tried to use LibreOffice to print it. I also wanted to fix a few things that the tool does not handle smoothly: Get the header lines numbered, insert a table of contents, reformat some pictures, make sure that some individual pages are printed at odd page numbers and other common stuff. So I thought I am pretty well in this 95%+ comfort zone. I spent about a week trying to get this paper copy, analysed why things did not work as expected, read and created bug reports. Then I gave up, activated an old Word 97 installation on an old machine, and got my document printed within a couple of hours. So after I lost a lot of time the only solution I know of is: Use the Microsoft tool. Case closed. What went wrong? - Maybe it is not possible to use LibreOffice to handle my report for the simple reason that it does not support the necessary RTF format. I was not aware that this might be a problem until I created bug 83204 and noticed Word 2010 reporting the use of a "compatibility mode" when it opened the test example. As LibreOffice did not report any problems with the file format, I tried to find out for what reason some of the headers were plain text while others had the correct header format. So the RTF import should provide information that helps to answer my questions that are still open: Does LibreOffice support the RTF format I need or not? If the format is supported, is there a bug in the RTF import or is the effect I observed a consequence of some concept I do not understand yet? - I was not aware that this Outline Numbering tool exists. Therefore I started pressing F11 to get the Styles and Formatting window. Here you seem to get all what you need to define the outline style: Paragraph formats for headers, outline levels, and list styles containing outline formats. I needed some time to understand how the Numbering Style dialogue works, and when I finally was able to create the style I realized that it did not work as expected. I did not get a hint from the user interface that I might be on the wrong track. Therefore I considered the observed behaviour as an error. Only after I somehow stumbled over the Outline Numbering tool I could correct my wrong idea of the concepts behind the numbering. That's why I proposed the additional buttons that lead to the Outline Numbering tool. - Of course I tried to find help information by pressing the corresponding help buttons in the windows I used but did not get any useful information. On a second thought I would say I feel it is pretty hard to develop a correct idea of how outline numbering works if you happen to start from the wrong place. I don't think changing the summary is a good idea as it suggests that this problem can be solved on a bug by bug basis. In short, I see the root of the problem in the interaction of: - Problems in the user interface (missing feedback, access to functionality not at expected locations, "Outline" denotes different things in the Outline Numbering tool and in the Numbering Style window, etc.), - Missing help information and - Plain bugs. Solving this problem requires activities in different areas like RTF import, harmonizing various parts of the user interface, writing and translating help information, etc. I fear that fixing all these things requires more resources that are available to this project and I therefore will not see this problem solved any time soon. I know of some failed attempts of municipal authorities to switch to Linux and a corresponding office software. In Munich where such a project succeeded there is now a discussion about switching back to Microsoft products. I guess that problems like the one I described here are an important cause of these failures and the current discussion despite the fact that they may be in the 5%- part of cases. Regards, Albrecht Created separate bug reports for different issues addressed in this report. Made this bug depend on some related reports: bugs that contibute to or are caused by the confusion; or proposals about improvements. Added META tag to indicate the idea of collecting this kind of problems at a single place. I agree that some improvement is needed. Failing time atm to dive in details, except my comment in bug 83369 So set to NEEDINFO as to find out details .. ;) |
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