Every free program that required effort deserves respect. However, your program is very weak compared to even the Word App within the Microsoft Office suite. Still, it is respectable, and I enjoy using it for PDF files.
Thank you.
Every post deserves a little knowledge of the rules and acceptation of these. Tag base is reserved for issues about the DB front-end component names Base. So your post belongs either in tag common, meaning it applies to all components Writer, Calc, Draw, …, or tag writer as you seem to target Word challenger, or perhaps in category Feed Back*.
To be constructive, your post should enumerate a few points where your find weaknesses so they they can be addressed.
Are you aware that Writer is not a drop-in replacement for Word? that it is build upon different founding principles? Have you ever read Bruce Byfield’s Designing with LibreOffice (available after clicking on “More” and scrolling sown a bit) which clearly explains the concept of styles, which are globally absent from Word?
Last point: this site is not manned by developers, though they sometimes connect to it. You should expose your disappointments so that we, users, could discuss them and eventually support them should you submit enhancement requests (has any such request ever been successful with M$?).
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That’s the design book that fails white space design. For example, the lower-order headings crowd paragraph content.
Could you point me to an example? I just downloaded the second edition (ODT format) and did not find any “accident” (but this a superficial browsing).
By looking at it with my present expertise level, I found many clumsinesses in formatting.
First page with a lower-order heading: https://designingwithlibreoffice.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/DWL-SecondEdition.pdf#page=19
I was trained by a cartographer who would insist on more white space around larger fonts. In the example shown there should be more space below the heading line with the larger font compared to other text lines. (It can be thought of as being like opposing magnetic fields.)
The same issue occurs throughout the book.
(It’s hilarious to have this discussion on this forum given what it does to paragraphs in replies.)
So I took the liberty to change this…
I’m always amused, when I see LibreOffice on MS-servers converting Word/Exel-Documents to pdf…
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I fully agree with this. But this is not a “weakness” in Writer. Put rather the blame on the author who did not configure his styles accordingly.
When aesthetics is concerned, Writer is a “passive” tool: it accepts blindly what the author requested. It will not spontaneously modify this; otherwise you become prisoner of what developers implemented without the possibility to override it. I think this is worse than keeping debatable author’s choices.
TDF is not responsible for the site hiccups. The underlying engine is Discourse which is an independent application. But you can easily drive Discourse when you realise it is fed with HTML assisted by MarkDown. HTML standard states that sequences of white space are merged to a single occurrence. This includes new lines. The only unusual thing is that spaces and new lines are considered the same for this rule.
A few HTML directives are filtered out for security and reliability. But you can still issue <br> if you want to clearly separate paragraphs.
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No disagreement but my comment was:
Bonus: 13 Principles of Design (YouTube)
It has to wear this one as poor configuration, the issue doesn’t occur with Discourse on other sites.
<br> used in this paragraph actually gives two blank lines (instead of none).
While I think a sentence like this is only a weak attempt of trolling, I also think it should have an answer. (For different reasons, we often prefer comments on this ask-site.)
If one seeks a drop in replacement for Word etc. like a clone the one should look elsewhere. It is not intended. If you ask: Can I solve the same problems, do the same tasks, then you should check it out.
“Weak?” The answer to this depends on what you know, understand and need.
- A lot of users may neither need nor understand the feature, but as I used bash/awk on unix since 1985 I really like to find regular expressions in Open/LibreOffice instead of the simple Wildcards used on DOS/Windows
- A main point for me is having LibreOffice also on Linux. (So I’m not forced to use Win11 or buy new hardware for the same task as before.) I understand this is a stategic issue for MS, but I fail to see this as “weak” on the side of LO.
- I remember others swearing for around two years, after MS “introduced”/enforced ribbons, while “weak” LO allows ribbons as well as menus and there is even a third mode in muffin.
- To have python as a second macro-language I’ve always seen as a clear advantage, even as “my” macros will not really use the advantages of python. And one can also use Javascript etc.
- Admitted MS did a good job to create usable database. But the idea to connect to anything available via ODBC/JDBC is simple and advanced at the same time. Together with queries dragged to Calc one can do pretty sophisticated stuff here. And it does not matter much, if data is in a local Sqlite-file or a remote MariaDB. MS could have avoide a lot of mail-merge-code in Word, if their database was not sold separate.
- With my background in TeX I really like the approach to use styles in Writer/Calc, even if I don’t use it much. It is good to have it, when I need it.
IMHO the real advantage of MS-Office is the huge number of companies, who develop “solutions” based on MSO (besides control of Windows, if they “need” something).
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