Yes, the button probably should say "Screen down" instead of page down for
most uses of the button and only say "Page down" for those rare cases where
it really does mean a page.
Regards from
Tom :)
PS blimey a short answer for once!! lol
From: Brian Barker <b.m.barker@btinternet.com>
To: users@global.libreoffice.org
Sent: Friday, 15 February 2013, 15:15
Subject: Re: [libreoffice-users] page down in word processors
At 09:35 15/02/2013 -0500, Eric Beversluis wrote:
Something I've never figured out--and seems true of LO/OO as well as M$
Word: When reading through a document, one hits 'PgDn', but one doesn't get
a new page--it only scrolls down some seemingly arbitrary number of lines.
One has to scan the new screen to see what one left off reading and one may
only have gotten a half page of new reading for the effort.
Maybe I'm spoiled by e-readers. But maybe, even after all these years,
I haven't figured out how to do this correctly in a word processor.
I think you are missing the different functions of the two sorts of
software. E-readers are what they say they are: readers. In other words,
their users are using them to read documents. More than that, in general
they will be reading the documents sequentially: when they get to the end
of one page, they will next want to see the next page. And the only sense
of "page" is as much as fills the screen of the display device.
Word processors are quite different. In general, they are still fixated
on printing the final document: the page size is the format of the eventual
supposed printed version, not necessarily (and not usually) the size and
format of the screen used for display. People usually choose settings that
display less than a printed page of a document; if you were looking at such
a screenful and then moved down a full page, you would unhelpfully have
missed part of the text.
But the bigger point is that a word processor is designed for editing,
not reading. If you are editing at one point in a document and you now
need to move down to a point currently off your screen image, it is not at
all obvious - quite unlikely, in fact - that you would want to move to a
following page. It is much more likely that you would want to be able to
see some part of the document further down but whilst also still seeing the
part on which you had just been working.
The original model, then, is that no-one would read documents on screen
but only from hard copy. It is interesting that software has been moving
towards servicing screen reading, albeit rather slowly. Microsoft
Powerpoint allows you to save a presentation as a "slide show", in which
case it opens for any recipient as for display, not for further editing.
Microsoft Word has a reading mode, which displays screenfuls - not
necessarily in the original layout - and in which your page down function
works as you want. There is also a freeware Word Viewer available from
Microsoft, intended for users without Microsoft Word installed. Again,
since this is a reader and not an editor, it responds to page down requests
by moving down a screenful. Oh, and try opening a read-only file with
LibreOffice Writer: I think you'll find that it will now treat "page down"
differently and move down (almost) a screenful.
Should word processing and similar software provide an explicit reading
mode for use in reading, not editing, documents? Possibly. Meanwhile, if
you want something close to this behaviour in Writer, here's your
workaround: just click the Edit File button in the Standard toolbar to
toggle on this behaviour.
I trust this helps.
Brian Barker