Re: Project proposal accepted for GSoC 2016

Hi Rosemary,

Perhaps this is a shameless plug, but perhaps you can also look at the 
default settings for LibreOffice in undo functionality. It seems to be 
talking about the same thing?

Perhaps it is doing exactly what I want, if I look at your project 
proposal.

The currently reality is simply that my webmails in Firefox and any 
other browser, or any online form I fill in, no matter how rudimentary, 
has better undo functionality than does LibreOffice.

LibreOffice will undo some of the last 100 changes, but they are often 
single characters.

Firefox will undo entire blocks of text, and always enable the 
restoration of whatever you have written, no matter how long ago.

The same is true for other browsers like Opera and Chrome.

It just sucks in LibreOffice because many times I have wanted to return 
to something and it was just not possible, and that is just entirely 
primitive and undeveloped.

I only once saw a thread online when I searched, and the person 
cynically responded that this would save memory, that only having memory 
for 100 individual changes would be a great boon to the product, because 
those 100k you could otherwise possibly need (depending on the size of 
the document of course) would cripple the program, to his opinion.

So my 5k document as a manner of speaking that might be internally 
represented by I don't know how many bytes, would cripple LibreOffice 
and reduce it to ashes if it had to save more than 100 individual 
character changes, according to this wise author.

It would bloat the program beyond recognition and fill many gigabytes, 
even terabytes of memory, so no, we cannot change that thing, sorry.

That was the gist of his message, in any case.

Perhaps it was just some random person, but still.

So please you know. Block-level undo. If you save the time of any 
change, this is easy to do, because you can logarithmically tie blocks 
of changes together easily based on time and possibly paragraph spacing.

Right now my writing is much safer if I use just your average no-makeup 
online form. Undo in LibreOffice is practically non-existent, how 
dysfunctional it is.


> [1] Project abstract
> https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/organizations/4911387578990592/#4812992520650752


Regards, Xen (Bart).