[Libreoffice] Why BLK selection mode? (was: Re: LO status bar annoyances)

Hi David, Sebastian, all!

Am Mittwoch, den 01.12.2010, 12:51 +0100 schrieb David Tardon:
> On Tue, Nov 30, 2010 at 11:26:54AM +0100, Sebastian Spaeth wrote:
> > - I have to single-click on the INSRT and STD->EXT->ADD->BLK and
> >   language selection thingies, but to double-click on the Page 1/1 and
> >   "Default" for something to happen. I just found out by coincidence
> >   today that I can launch some action for the latter.

Strange, isn't it? :-)

[...]

> BLK selects (roughly) rectangular blocks (is this useful for anything?)

Concerning the usefulness ... as far as I remember (I had a talk with
Frank Loehmann, the UX guy, who worked on that feature a few years ago),
it has been introduced to improve working with e.g. "fake tables" being
made of tabs, or working with imported data which is formatted with mono
spaced fonts.

The specification at [1] also mentions something like that, e.g. editing
of OCRed text - may helpful, if such software is unable to recover the
layout of a page (tables, page columns, etc.).

Whether this is helpful or not ... at least I tried to answer :-)


Cheers,
Christoph

[1]
http://specs.openoffice.org/writer/selection_enhancement/Block_Selection_of_Text