Hello Jim,
I'm glad you found this useful, and even more glad to know that
LibreOffice is rid of the pasting bug. There's been a lot of work in
cleaning up the code in LibreOffice, so we might see a lot of
improvements in that line in the next versions.
Please drop by if you stumble upon another issue or though (not a bug)
in the interacting part (we call it user/usability experience). We are
working on this right now, and I reafirm: user input is very important
to us.
Cheers./
PS.: I forward your mail to the list, hope you don't mind :-)
Em 10-05-2011 22:12, Jim Fuqua escreveu:
Rafael,
Thanks for the lesson on selection. It works better than the old
WordStar method. I stand corrected. The method also works in other
programs also. Thanks again.
The secret to change acceptable to people who depend on their word
processor for many hours each day might be to make changes simple,
optional and few at a time. It is disconcerting to open a program
after an update and find that you no longer know how to use the
program efficiently.
I tried to crash LibreOffice using a large document from the
suspect source. The document was a copy of, 'Roe v. Wade' marked with
about a hundred or more links. It did not crash LibreOffice as such
documents once did with both OpenOffice and MS Word. The next time I
boot into Windows I will see if it still crashes my old version of MS
Word. Even if it does, it does not mean that such a page would crash
the current version.
I found that I could eliminate all of the text hyperlinks in the
document by selecting the entire document and right clicking and
taking the delete hyperlinks option. This did not eliminate the large
number of hyperlinked images. I suspect they are used for tracking.
Perhaps they were just reduced to linked images but when you double
click on one a box pops up that says Picture and has a tab that says
"Hyperlink" with a lot of data appended to the URL. I don't know
whether or not such links are capable of transmitting data. Either
way the document was unusable without removing perhaps a hundred such
images.
The trick of pasting the original document into gedit and then
selecting and copying the entire document and pasting it into
LibreOffice does get rid of these picture links as well as the text links.
Jim Fuqua
On 05/10/2011 10:45 AM, Rafael Rocha Daud wrote:
Hello, Jim,
is good to hear from a heavy user that speaks from a user point of view.
As a community driven software, LibreOffice team is made of people
who does not only think and program, but mainly of people that use
the software a lot.
Having said that, user input is always welcome, and I'll try to
address some of your issues.
Firstly, LibreOffice design team is thinking a lot here about change,
and there's is also a fine balance between being respectful with old
users and preserving the learning curve, and being conservative. Most
of LibreOffice aims are to diminish the learning curve, making it
easy for new users, but still preserving the features that make
LibreOffice the weapon of choice of experienced users.
I have never used WordStar (I'm such a young bastard) but in
LibreOffice you can position the cursor where you want your selection
to begin, then scroll to the page where the end of the selection will
be; press Shift and then click the exact point to be the end of the
selection, and everything in between will be selected. I don't know
how much this is different from WordStar, and I don't know if you
already knew about this option, but it's quite easy to me. Plus, the
selection can be incremental: if you decide to add one or two
paragraphs after you made your selection, just hold Shift, and click
after those paragraphs: they'll be added to the selection. Using
Control instead of Shift, you can select groups of text, instead of
continuous paragraphs; the difference is you have to use the mouse to
make the selections (and you can't combine Shift and Control).
Nevertheless I second you in that we should have a keyboard-only
option, especially because an accidental click while you're scrolling
your fifty pages will take you back you to the start of the process.
Of course, you should press Shift before starting to scroll to avoid
that, but we might be more flexible, offering the keyboard option.
Let's see what others think about it.
As for autoformatting and autocorrect, you have the option from the
menu: Tools>AutoCorrectOptions>[tab]Options and then you may disable
the first line, 'Use substitution table' and the 11th line, 'Apply
numbering'. There are another options you may want to disable. I
myself don't like much of the AutoCorrect features, as useful as they
may be sometimes. Especially the Numbering one is very disturbing, as
it applies styles without you being aware of it. This is confusing
for unexperienced users, and sometimes it's annoying for experienced
ones. We might thing of disabling it by default. This is not a
per-document option, though, and I believe this would be difficult to
achieve, but someone might have a more informed opinion on this.
Finally, the crashing when pasting some pages is very upsetting. I
believe this to be a bug (even though you're saying the pages are
designed to crash the software) and should be fixed. Would you
consider reporting it here (https://bugs.freedesktop.org/)?
Cheers./
Em 10-05-2011 07:00, design+help@libreoffice.org escreveu:
Assunto:
[libreoffice-design] Usability comes from stability
De:
Jim Fuqua <jimfuqua@comcast.net>
Data:
Mon, 09 May 2011 22:16:10 -0500
Para:
design@libreoffice.org
In plotting the course for changes in LibreOffice Writer,
developers would do well to listen to people who use the program for
many hours a day instead of theorists who do more thinking and
programming than typing.
Change for change sake is rarely a good thing. Change that
brings modest improvement for a new user may be a nuisance to the
experienced user. There is a fine balance between the value of the
improvement and the inconvenience to the experienced user base.
One of the reasons I moved from Microsoft products to Linux and
OpenOffice and now LibreOffice was the incessant change from version
to version with no improvement in usability worthy of the learning
curve required for the new version. It seemed that the process was
designed to sell upgrades more than to improve the product. I did
not mind the cost, but did hate the learning curve with no
perceivable benefit.
William F. Buckley once said "/I'm told there are better
programs, but I'm also told there are better alphabets./" referring
to unwanted changes in WordStar and its replacements programs. I too
used that program in the early 80s. Some of the features for
selecting large blocks of text worked better than the alternatives
available today. Many of the changes came from people who do much
more thinking than typing.
As a lawyer I often type for hours per day. I often must copy
and paste into gedit and then copy and paste into LibreOffice to get
rid of multiple hyperlinks and other undesirable baggage present in
the source. Some web content providers add hundreds of links in
legal documents to make copying difficult. Some even include
mechanisms to crash MS Word or OpenOffice. I learned to copy into a
primitive editor and then into my word processor to strip out such
baggage and avoid such crashes. I haven't tried to see if the crash
mechanisms will crash LibreOffice, but I suspect they will.
Have you ever tried to copy and paste fifty pages out of a
hundred page document? It was easy to do in WordStar but difficult
with all of the scrolling in current era programs. WordStar had a
simple command to mark a starting spot for selection and another
command to mark the ending spot for a selection. Perhaps there is an
easy way in LibreOffice. If so please let me know.
Many of the help mechanisms in LibreOffice and MS Word are
useful in a long document and a nuisance in a short document. There
should be a simple way to individually disable each help feature in
a document. No Bullets and Numbering, no formatting of table
entries, no AutoCorrect. Many casual users don't use tables because
of the spread-sheet like features that are useful to the
sophisticated user but can be a nuisance to a casual user.
AutoCorrect must have thirty options, but "never" is not one of them.
There is logic for the major changes that Microsoft uses to sell
new product. There is little reason to make changes to LibreOffice
for change sake. Change should be optional unless the benefit is
profound and the learning curve small. There should always be an
easy way to disable any help feature that changes the document.
Both the opt-out and opt-in should be easy to select for individual
documents.
Jim Fuqua
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