Re: [libreoffice-users] Re: Paragraph styles

I tend to agree with Wolfgang on this one.

I think the difference for Felmon is that you are the "master of documents." 
Sounds like its your job to clean up everyone's mess and you seem to get the 
final say on how the document will be structured. In the legal arena, it's 
rare that one person will be the "master." Rather, you have a bunch of 
individuals, plus their administrative assistants all adding to the 
confusion. The "master" is the person who performs the final edit.

The obvious "problem" is that there are simply too many different ways of 
accomplishing a task with our "one size fits all" office suites. Want it to 
work like a typewriter? You can do that. Want it to work like a typesetting 
printing press? You can do that, too.

In the world of DOS, we all had to learn how our programs worked. Then as 
GUIs became popular, programs expanded to allow many different ways of 
working. In 2007, MS added yet another method with the Ribbon.

It would be great to use a more structured environment like LyX/LaTeX. But, 
the learning curve there is so steep that I can't imagine any business 
professional having the patience to learn it.

Virgil



-----Original Message----- 
From: Felmon Davis
Sent: Friday, May 03, 2013 12:41 PM
To: users@global.libreoffice.org
Subject: Re: [libreoffice-users] Re: Paragraph styles

On Fri, 3 May 2013, Wolfgang Keller wrote:

> > I never even try to share documents between different programs, such
> > as Word and LO or OO.
>
> I never even try to share documents between two users using both the
> same program *and* the same document template, if the program is Word
> (or LO /OO). With these applications, the re-use of content is
> exclusively limited to raw, unformatted text. Trying anything else will
> drive you up the walls.

your walls must be very adhesive. I share documents with people all
the time because a couple of committees I've been on had me as the
'master of documents', that is, I would take other people's work and
bundle it together, edit and produce drafts for them to work on, then
I would do up the final report. they almost always are using some
version of Word.

sure, there are problems but my walls are pretty footprint-free. but I
think this goes to show not only are there different standards of
tolerance for problems, there different magnitudes of problems, thus,
if I were dealing with 100 people instead of six or seven, it might be
a different issue.

of course I'm not denying there are other solutions which are
technically superior in some way. but for many of us the situation is
not as dire as you paint it, walls and all.

F.

> > If you need collaborative authoring, you need something that
> *imposes* a pre-defined document structure (such as e.g. an XML
> schema, LaTeX document classes unfortunately are not as restrictive) and
> thus absolutely locks out *any* possiblity of "finger-painting", and
> preferrably something that also provides seamless integration for
> revision control systems such as e.g. Subversion.
>
> With LyX/LaTeX, structured XML authoring applications (or some document
> processing applications like Worperfect or Framemaker, provided the
> authors are perfectly disciplined), collaborative authoring is
> possible to a certain degree.
>
> With Word (or LO/OO) it is strictly impossible at any reasonable
> degree of efficiency.
>
> If there was a way in LO/OO to imperatively re-strict the user interface
> for a certain document to the application of styles defined within the
> document, this might improve things, but given how styles are
> implemented in LO/OO, I doubt that it would really work. Besides that
> styles don't hold structure information anyway, since templates aren't
> schemas in LO/OO.
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Wolfgang

--
Felmon Davis

You'd like to do it instantaneously, but that's too slow.

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