Lotus Symphony code for OpenOffice coming soon

Posted May 18, 2012 8:11 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
In reply to: Lotus Symphony code for OpenOffice coming soon by neilbrown
Parent article: Lotus Symphony code for OpenOffice coming soon

As someone who contributed a lot on LWN to discussions about Sun OpenOffice, who uses LO, and has their name on the developer credits, I would take strong issue in "two independent suites are likely to put a lot of effort into being the same".

I am well known and on record as hating Word, and LO/OO writer by association (as a bit of a clone). So why do I use it? Because I feel I no longer have any choice. I'm a WordPerfect fan, and if I could get a paid-for copy that would run on my system (gentoo linux) I would buy it (if I could afford it, I'm currently unemployed :-(

And unfortunately, the feature that locks me in to WordPerfect is a feature that cannot be added to LO without *massive* engineering effort. Don't say "well, learn LO/OO better, then". That feature is also a *massive* *time* *saver* for me, and more experience with Word or Writer won't help. It's the feature that lets me look at a document - ANY document whether written by me or anyone else - and lets me work out, *in* *seconds*, WHY the document is doing what it's doing. How often have you had a document with odd formatting and you've been unable to fathom out why? That just doesn't happen in WordPerfect for me.

In case you haven't guessed that feature, it's called "reveal codes". I guess I could emulate it by dissassembling a Writer document and reading the raw html ...

Cheers,
Wol

Lotus Symphony code for OpenOffice coming soon

Posted May 18, 2012 16:45 UTC (Fri) by teknohog (guest, #70891) [Link]

I remember using reveal codes in WP back in the day. Now I just use LaTeX ;)

I imagine this could be one reason why few people want reveal codes in word processors any more. Those who like to think in code will use LaTeX and other markup systems. (Thus enabling things like generating reports from simulation runs, which is hard to imagine if you are stuck with a word processor.) There are intermediate solutions like LyX, which is a GUI frontend to LaTeX, but as such it is not comparable to what we call word processors.

Re: “Reveal Codes”

Posted May 20, 2012 4:12 UTC (Sun) by ldo (guest, #40946) [Link] (1 responses)

No modern word processor has a “reveal codes” feature. You know why? Because no modern word processor does its formatting by embedding formatting codes in the text stream.

I’ve hit this in my brief dalliances with WordPerfect, where you might be deleting text immediately after a run of, say, bold text, and you start deleting into the bold text, and because you have deleted the “turn bold off” code at the end of that run, suddenly all the text from that point on to the end of the document has turned bold.

No modern word processor suffers from this problem.

Re: “Reveal Codes”

Posted May 20, 2012 15:40 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

Microsoft Word does have this functionality.

Lotus Symphony code for OpenOffice coming soon

Posted May 21, 2012 16:04 UTC (Mon) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]

Actually since modern word processing formatting is done much the same way as html (some code soup + separate styling), there is no reason except for developer time that one could not inspect the formatting off an odf document the same way they can inspect a web page formatting in a modern browser like firefox via the style inspector.

In the past years, the html world stopped trailing word processing formatting and word processing is now trailing html world