SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Berlin, July 28, 2017 – The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 5.4, the last major release of the LibreOffice 5.x family, immediately available for Windows, macOS and Linux, and for the cloud. LibreOffice 5.4 adds significant new features in every module, including the usual large number of incremental improvements to Microsoft Office file compatibility.
Inspired by Leonardo da Vinci's "simplicity is the ultimate sophistication", LibreOffice developers have focused on file simplicity as the ultimate document interoperability sophistication. This makes ODF and OOXML files written by the free office suite more robust and easier to exchange with other users than the same documents generated by other office suites.
Thanks to the efforts of developers, the XML description of a new document written by LibreOffice is 50% smaller in the case of ODF (ODT), and around 90% smaller in the case of OOXML (DOCX), in comparison with the same document generated by the leading proprietary office suite. Additional details in the file simplicity backgrounder: https://nextcloud.documentfoundation.org/s/5Oe8guDN0XSS7h8.
(Score: 2) by tadas on Saturday July 29 2017, @02:57PM (4 children)
Wake me up when they add Outline mode to the word processor. It's the only reason I keep using Word.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 29 2017, @06:55PM (3 children)
What's that?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by choose another one on Saturday July 29 2017, @08:12PM (2 children)
Outstanding feature request from about 2002, back in OO days: https://bz.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=3959 [apache.org]
Masses of discussion on it at that link, also most voted feature request at one point (think it might still be but it's been closed now), indicating a lot of interest in it. But not from those doing the dev. Same situation in LO now, I think (I've stopped bothering to keep up with it). Based on number of votes and the discussions, and comparing to those for other "missing" features, there are quite a lot of users who are still using MS Office solely for this reason. Looks like there's at least two on this forum...
Basically, if you know what it is and use it (in Word or other software), you won't want to work without it for anything other than very short documents. If you don't know, then you won't understand what's so good about it or what you are missing and will probably suggest some entirely dissimilar feature in LO as a substitute.
Bit like if you've never been skiing you won't really understand why people want to chuck themselves down a snow covered mountain with a bit of wood strapped to each foot, but you can see there's a mode in LO where you strap a skateboard to each foot and push yourself round a grass track, so that should be equivalent (and less cold) so that means "CLOSED WONT-FIX".
(Score: 3, Interesting) by frojack on Saturday July 29 2017, @09:15PM (1 child)
Outlining does exist. Its just the Name and minor features that differs.
Its not done quite as slickly as Old versions of Word, but it works similar. Perhaps it is as close as patents will let them get.
Its called Navigator. Uses buttons to move paragraphs up/down/left-right rather than drag and drop. Other than that it does everything outline mode did.
Probably the discussion died down because its good enough, at least if you are open minded enough to stop reading the MS Word manual when trying to figure out how LO works.
I've had tp maintain several big-ish user manuals in Word/Office and Migrated them all to LO over the years. This simply hasn't been an issue.
I've also written new manuals completely in LO, starting from an outline.
Open you mind, Close your wallet.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Sunday July 30 2017, @10:25PM
Navigator is not outline view. There are countless examples already written of why navigator is not an outline view, both in that bug report and elsewhere (LO has a bug for it too), but don't take my word for it, take the word of the developers themselves:
"the whole Writer team agrees with you that the Outline View is one of the most important missing features in Writer" ( https://bz.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=3959#c54 [apache.org] )
"I suggest those who find outlines to be an indispensible feature find a product where the feature is available. Here it is at best available someday in an indefinite and very speculative future." ( https://bz.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=3959#c299 [apache.org] )
Or look at:
https://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation/FAQ/Writer/FormattingPagesAndDocuments/What_is_the_equivalent_of_MSO_outline_mode_in_OpenOffice.org%3F [openoffice.org]
https://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Writer_Views [openoffice.org]
https://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Writer/View_Concepts [openoffice.org]
Pretty sure that is not the MS Word manual I have open in those links, but maybe the people who wrote those pages don't know how OO/LO works either?
Patents are not the problem, you are just showing your ignorance there. Decent outliners predated Word and have been produced since, including open source. Impress apparently has a good one (never used it myself so I have no opinion on it) such that several requesters were simply saying "put the Impress outline view in Writer".
The discussion died down because it became clear no one was going to fix this, to my knowledge that has not changed and as far as I am aware carries over to LO. The real problem, as admitted by the developers (or those who were the developers) is that the architecture of Writer, which dates back to its origin in a commercial product, is simply not up to the job without major refactoring work, so it isn't going to happen, probably no one even knows how to start it after the teams and development efforts fractured and stalled.