Highlights of OpenOffice.org 2.3 Writer

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Thursday, 19 Jul 2007

Highlights of OpenOffice.org 2.3 Writer

Mathias Bauer

OpenOffice.org 2.3 is coming soon and last week the last new features for this version have been integrated into the milestone m221 . A comprehensive list of all new features and enhancements can be found in our Wiki. Though the most remarkable changes in 2.3 surely are the improved Chart component (a complete reimplementation and replacement of the old one) and the new Database Report Designer the other teams of course didn't rest and so also provide a lot of bug fixes, enhancements and new features. As the Writer project lead I want to show you some of the improvements from the Writer perspective (and of course also from my own one).

Centered view in Writer

The most exciting enhancement in Writer may be that Writer now centers documents in their view – a feature that was requested for a long time. I hope you will enjoy it.

MediaWiki filter

I also want to point you to our new MediaWiki export filter. It is a contribution from Bernhard Haumacher and is very powerful. A Wiki page that was created with the filter can be seen here . As you can see from this page and the filter specification, it supports a lot of formattings and allows you to create nice Wiki content in OpenOffice.org, using your familiar environment. Currently it creates a text file in your file system (like every export filter) but there is some ongoing development that will make working with Wiki in OpenOffice.org even better and easier – stay tuned!

Language Guessing

OpenOffice.org is able to guess the language of a text. It doesn't work for single words as this is not enough text to analyze it sufficiently but it works very well for larger portions of text. We have integrated the Language Guessing component into the context menu of misspelled words and so now can present better suggestions for the language of a paragraph. The Language Guessing component also plays an important role in our improved language selection control that is currently developed in a Google Summer Of Code project .

ODF 1.1

The main topic of ODF1.1 is “ accessibility”. We have implemented some enhancements for this and the most remarkable improvement in Writer is the generation of “soft page breaks” in the XML file format. This feature allows ODF compatible applications to read or process documents generated by other ODF compatible applications to detect where the layout of the creator application made the page breaks. So they can get to know which text resides on which page without actually carrying out the layout themselves. This is particularly important for digital talking book formats.

Further improvements

Another addition that might come in handy for a lot of users is an option to change the behavior of line breaks (SHIFT-ENTER) in justified paragraphs. In OpenOffice.org 1.x the line before the break was not justified, but that was changed for documents created with OpenOffice.org2.0. An internal compatibility setting preserved the old behavior for all documents created with OpenOffice.org1.x and now (due to frequent demand!) users can use it also in new documents:

(Remark: due to the rule that options shouldn't be checked ON to switch something OFF the OOo1.x compatible behavior is achieved by switching the new option OFF).

In OpenOffice.org 2.3 there are a lot more small improvements and bug fixes and I just want to list just some of them because they are enhancements that come in handy for me:

Our table support has been enhanced so that in new documents you will be able to create much more complex tables until they are screwed up. ;-)
The “Styles and Formatting” window now keeps the selected styles filter (an enhancement that I desperately awaited myself!)
Printer settings stored in documents can be ignored (you will like that feature if you move documents between different networks or between different parts of very large networks)
The “Location” property in the “Document Properties” dialog now can be selected and copied into the clipboard (nice if the path is too long to be shown completely)
The “Customize Keyboard” dialog was rearranged a bit and now looks better and is easier to operate. Sometimes things are so obvious that you wonder why you never had the idea to do it. So thanks to Kyrill Palagin for his nice suggestion !
An interesting feature for developers: a new UNO service is available (com.sun.star.io.SequenceInputStream) that lets you use data you have as a ByteSequence wherever OpenOffice.org wants you to provide a stream. Nice one.

If you want to try out some of the improvements you can download the developer milestone m221. Please be aware that this version should be treated as a beta version that shouldn't be used for productive work.

tags: features openoffice.org writer

Posted by Mathias Bauer on 19 Jul 2007 | PermaLink |

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Comments

holzauge said: Why doesn't 2.3 come with the new icons? One of the reasons OOo doesn't get traction is this hideous 1995-like interface.

Posted by holzauge on July 21, 2007 at 01:21 PM CEST #

Chris Cunningham said: Ooooh. I very much like the idea of being able to import/export WikiText. This is quite a killer feature. - Chris

Posted by Chris Cunningham on July 21, 2007 at 04:49 PM CEST #

Mathias Bauer said: holzauge: I don't understand what "1995-like" means and why this should be something negative. Not the age of icons or the age or their look is important but their ability to express the functionality they represent in the best possible way. And, honestly: do you really believe people prefer MS Office over OOo because of the icons? Get serious, please.
Of course look and feel is not unimportant, but it's a matter of taste. I for myself like the current icons that we have in the "official releases" much more than e.g. those I have seen in the Ubuntu version. These icons look like the pictures on Lego Duplo pieces to me - children's toys. You can't please everybody. So OOo allows choice: icon sets can be exchanged via configuration.
The current icons have been professionally designed and they match their associated functions much better than most other OOo icon sets I have seen. Admittedly there are many more colorful and more freaky ones - but Is *that* what is the most important aspect of icons?
Besides that I don't know which "new icons" you are talking about. If anybody created and contributed new icon sets we will gratefully accept that contribution and integrate it. And thanks to OOo's ability to switch icon sets everybody can adjust the look and feel as wanted. As icons seem to be very important to you - I'm waiting for your contribution. ;-)

Posted by Mathias Bauer on July 21, 2007 at 06:51 PM CEST #

sven said: dear mathias - don't underestimate the emotional value of icons. good graphic design provides good meaningful information AND is pleasant to look at. :) current openoffice icons do look dated, you have to admit that :D

Posted by sven on July 21, 2007 at 11:40 PM CEST #

Thomas said: Mathias, are there any plans to become ODF 1.1 ready? Or is the next goal ODF 1.2 at some indefinite future date? (The OpenDocument TC made no significant progress in the last months, so ODF 1.2 will probably not ready in 2007 with its metadata and formula additions...)

Posted by Thomas on July 22, 2007 at 01:53 AM CEST #

Thomas said: Ah and I forget to say, that I am very impressed of the enhancements and new features of OOo 2.3. Thanks for the info in this blog!
The centered view in Writer is a long requested (visual) enhancement and the coming better language selection control will make OOo easier to handle. Future implementations like Notes2 and the Bibliographic Project will be further huge steps forward. But I hope little usability improvements like issue 19225 (style selection), 19414 (wheel-mouse scrolling in writer preview) and 28936 (style preview) will not be forgotten.
PS: I agree with holzauge, that a polished new interface will make the "acceptance" of OOo easier. The average user is judging a software by its "look" and feel (not only by its simple handling).

Posted by Thomas on July 22, 2007 at 02:31 AM CEST #

Someone said:

From Issue 19225: ... The previous selection should be remembered ...

That is now in place for 2.3--from the above list: "The 'Styles and Formatting' window now keeps the selected styles filter..."

I suppose issue 19225 could be closed now, except that the "Automatic" filter remains as dull as ever.

Posted by 69.248.236.96 on July 22, 2007 at 05:40 AM CEST #

holzauge said: Mathias - I was talking about the new "Galaxy" style icons at http://ui.openoffice.org/VisualDesign/OOo_galaxy.html. Against the backdrop of this respectable icons, the decision to keep the old icons is incomprehensible. As you were asking why 1995-like icons are something negative - they are out of place in a 2007 application - I suspect the decision to keep the old style was an ideological one.

Posted by holzauge on July 22, 2007 at 05:03 PM CEST #

Mathias Bauer said: holzauge: I still fail to see why the age of icons should be interesting. Icons not automatically look better because they are new. I also fail to see how ideological considerations could play a role here. The Galaxy icons just never have been discussed anywhere - today I saw them the first time! And the page shows only a few, I doubt that a complete set is available. If that interests you you should ask the ux team (on dev@ux.openoffice.org) why they didn't move forward with this effort.

Posted by Mathias Bauer on July 22, 2007 at 08:32 PM CEST #

Mtahias Bauer said: Thomas: we have implemented a lot of the ODF1.1 features, e.g. the soft page breaks. I'm not sure if we implemented all of them.
ODF1.2 has "feature freeze" end of this month, means: no further proposals will be accepted after that. I hope that they will finish in time so that we can implement a lot of it in OOo3.0.

Posted by Mtahias Bauer on July 22, 2007 at 08:40 PM CEST #

flaime said: Remember also important issues like these: http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=2131 http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=8302 opened since 2001 (from version 1.0.1), are there any plans on implementing this? I cannot believe this issues has been around this so long. In Excel things like these work and are used daily. Many users in my company ask for these improvements, not for centering the documents in Writer. Regards.

Posted by flaime on July 23, 2007 at 04:22 PM CEST #

Mathias Bauer said: flaime: you are talking about spreadsheet issues - not my part. You should ask the Calc developers about that.
Besides that: currently we have more than 7500(!) issues of type "enhancement" or "feature". And IMHO the age of an issue (discernible by its low issue number) shouldn't be a criterion to select those to work on. That would be quite stupid. In fact the matter is much more complicated. Please let me point you to another entry of GullFOSS where I tried to give some insight in this:
http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS/entry/why_all_issues_are_equal

Posted by Mathias Bauer on July 23, 2007 at 06:24 PM CEST #

Joe Smith said:

Mathias Bauer wrote:

I don't understand what "1995-like" means and why this should be something negative.

Why do car makers change the look of their cars every year?

Why do more expensive cars "look nicer" than cheaper cars?

It's a sad fact, mysterious to us engineering-types, that appearance is important to people, and even change of appearance from time to time, enhances the value of the product.

Posted by Joe Smith on July 23, 2007 at 07:49 PM CEST #

Kami said: "ODF1.2 has "feature freeze" end of this month, means: no further proposals will be accepted after that. I hope that they will finish in time so that we can implement a lot of it in OOo3.0." Will ODF1.2 have more controll over gafical elements? For example frames around paragraph, more competitive graphical abilities compared to MSO?

Posted by Kami on July 23, 2007 at 09:53 PM CEST #

flaime said: Thanks Mathias for your response. I certainly don't want to be critical with your job. It was only a consideration on what it is the way to work of developers and who instead as me watches the things from the side of who uses them. The Calc users that work in my company (200+) would prefer to see implemented things that already exist from much time in Excel rather than to see new characteristic. I simply deduce this doing daily support to these users and from discussions opened in the italian openoffice mailing list. I've just seen that this initiative could be the one I'm searching for: http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS/entry/improving_calc_usability I will direct my comments to this page. Best regards!

Posted by flaime on July 24, 2007 at 11:50 AM CEST #

Billyoungm said: Is it possible for OpenOffice to have different "skins" that provide a different look for icons, based on user preference? One thing I liked about OO was that it looked a lot like the commercial alternatives, like Microsoft. The new Vista version of Word, however, has a different look from the old Word, so this may be a barrier for people moving between the two programs.

Posted by Billyoungm on July 26, 2007 at 04:53 PM CEST #

Mathias Bauer said: As I wrote already: OOo is able to exchange icon sets. But besides that it doesn't have a "theming" like e.g. Firefox. OOo uses the Theming Engine of the Desktop system it is running on.
BTW: The "Galaxy" icon set is not ready (its author confirmed that to me). So no "ideological" considerations have taken place. ;-)

Posted by Mathias Bauer on July 27, 2007 at 11:19 AM CEST #

Prakash K. Pandya said: Can we have macro inbuilt that is used to convert figures into words. This is useful for person like me (running small office) and using OoWriter to create Invoice. Figures in tables of Writer file if can be converted into words it would be nice and handy :)

Posted by Prakash K. Pandya on July 31, 2007 at 03:46 PM CEST #

M Henri Day said: Mathias, the new version looks to be a welcome improvement on the current one, which hopefully will attract still more users. But I confess myself disappointed by the fact that Issue 75244, which deals with making the changing of the language used in a text or between texts more intuitive, doesn't seem to have been addressed in this new build. The ability to switch easily from one language to another in the GUI is important to multilingual users, who, I suspect, will comprise a large proportion of the prospective users that OOo hopes to attract in the coming years.... Henri

Posted by M Henri Day on July 31, 2007 at 03:57 PM CEST #

M Henri Day said: PS : I see now at http://specs.openoffice.org/appwide/linguistic/Set_Language_Attribute_for_Text.odt that the issue is indeed being addressed, and that the developers hope to have ia solution in place for OOo 2.4. Forgive my lack of patience and keep up the good work !...

Posted by M Henri Day on July 31, 2007 at 04:07 PM CEST #

RBLevin said: Regarding the UI "debate", a future version of OOo could make it more skinnable. I agree that the GUI is very much a 1995-era look and feel -- which I personally PREFER. But many users like the Apple look, the Swing look, the XP look, various Linux shell looks, or now, the Vista look.

Posted by RBLevin on July 31, 2007 at 05:35 PM CEST #

David Tod Sigafoos said: I have just tried the Dev version for conversion to wiki and found some problems. Am wondering the best place to give/take this information. Thanks

Posted by David Tod Sigafoos on July 31, 2007 at 07:23 PM CEST #

Feri said: When new versons of OOo come out, I always check if it has new icons. I'm using the 'Cristal' set, which is OK for me, but I hope a new, really good looking one will come out soon. I don't really recognize the bug fixes, but I definitely will appreciate a modern looking, nice icon set. But even without that OOo is my favourite.

Posted by Feri on July 31, 2007 at 07:49 PM CEST #

Mathias Bauer said: RBLevin: well, if people prefer the Mac look they should use the (native) Mac version of OOo - once if will be available. Again: OOo uses the theming engines of the desktop. So basically theming support is there. Icons are a different stuff, they don't belong to the system themes. But also again: OOo allows to extend icon sets easily. Just do it. :-) Feri: OOo3.0 hopefully is planned to have the new "Galaxy" icons that have been discussed here. Creating good an professionally designed icons (in two sizes and including high contrast icons) takes some time.

Posted by Mathias Bauer on July 31, 2007 at 08:26 PM CEST #

Mathias Bauer said: David: in case you find problems with the Wiki filter please report them in our Issue Tracker. Please make sure that the "Word processing" component is selected. Thank you.

Posted by Mathias Bauer on July 31, 2007 at 08:27 PM CEST #

M. Vijaybhasker Srinivas said: I have only the openoffice with me. An I am unable to: a) open the Office 2007 files. b) presever the format of MS Word files as it changes horribly and recipients of documents corrected by me complain a lot. c) define the paragraph style so that the space within the same paragraph styles is eliminated. Please look into the matter. I specially like the selection of a sentence with triple click. It came in handy a lot of times. Thanks for the free office suit.

Posted by M. Vijaybhasker Srinivas on July 31, 2007 at 08:41 PM CEST #

Rene said: I was wondering if http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=25072 (Cross-References to Headings) will make it into 2.3? This is a real productivity issue and especially important for users who want to switch from MS Word to OOo Writer. A lot of people need this functionality and the voting for this issue underlines its importance.

Posted by Rene on July 31, 2007 at 08:57 PM CEST #

JonaS said: I think that there are a couple of people that would disagree on the XP look, due to its rather bad resemblance with the standard WinXP-look (isn't it the Java version of XP look and feel applied?). But of course what we're dealing here are issues relating to two things as I see it - the overall theme (colors & accents) and resolution/details of the different icons in each sets. Conformity in each of these is what matters. What I mean is that we want standardized buttons/icons that users through different platforms understand based on intuition, but also continuous "freshness" of the various apps. I'm not currently aware of how the guys at the HCI projects are doing (I think they are doing just fine), but maybe the resolution is not primary the choice of being able to extend/import different icon/theme sets, but instead actual "normal" users perceiving a new freshness of icons, colors, accents once every 3-4 years, maybe even shorter time if resources permit.

Posted by JonaS on August 01, 2007 at 02:21 AM CEST #

JonaS said: I forgot one simple example. Take Word 2007 (I won't get into the new interface methodology...). Do you, guys, think that the different color schemes (blue, black, silver) would be interesting for the OOW community? And devoutly thank you for finally implementing the centered view. I've waited for quite some time now...

Posted by JonaS on August 01, 2007 at 02:30 AM CEST #

Martin said: I'm a new OOo user, who's been using it more and more for the last couple months. I've decided to migrate to OOo whenever possible because it's a very well developed piece of software, for sure! But I agree with the people who argue about new icons. Whenever a new version of a program comes out, it comes with a new look, and many times, I believe, that's most of what the new versions are all about, kind of like a lifting for an old face. I think it is unfortunate, but I also think it is realistic, to say that people get the sensation that what they're using is all new and rethought when they see a new interface. Because that's what it's all about (for lay people), as many times it's one of the few things that they have to judge a software with. Software companies have realized that years ago (just think of the clever windows). OOo has to play in a very competitive world out there, and has to fight against many wrong preconceptions, and the looks is just one of them.

Posted by Martin on August 01, 2007 at 07:11 AM CEST #

David Tod Sigafoos said: >David: in case you find problems with the Wiki filter please report them in our Issue Tracker. Please make sure that the "Word processing" component is selected. Thank you. Not sure what you mean by 'word processing component'. Writer is the only OOo tool that I have found that has the filter process. With simple File/Export/type selection .. Will go to the issue tracker .. thanks

Posted by David Tod Sigafoos on August 01, 2007 at 03:03 PM CEST #

David Tod Sigafoos said: Note .. sure that I am just lost but I did go to the Issue Tracker http://qa.openoffice.org/issue_handling/submission_gateway.html#project but did not find any way to assign to dev version. if you want to take this off line .. cool .. thanks

Posted by David Tod Sigafoos on August 01, 2007 at 08:31 PM CEST #

Mathias Bauer said: David, if you have an OOo account you can login and call our Issue Tracker at http://www.openoffice.org/issues/enter_bug.cgi. Here you should select the "Word processor" component. This will bring you to a page where you can enter the bug report. The "version" you should select here is the one of the milestone you have used, e.g. "680m212" in case you used the milestone "m212". Please save me from explaining the version names. ;-)

Posted by Mathias Bauer on August 03, 2007 at 12:49 AM CEST #

Mark said: No matter MS Word or OO Writer, one thing forces me to keep open a text editor in the adjacent window. That is find-replace of line endings in copy-paste operations. Try replacing line breaks with paragraph breaks or vice-versa. Try replacing line breaks with spaces (e.g. removing hard breaks). Try replacing LF with CRLF or vice-versa. Depending which program you use, some or none of this may be possible. OO Writer is still pretty frustrating. It can do some of these things, but poorly, and only by navigating OO developer assumptions that do not hold generally. Most text editors also suffer unfortunate "file format assumptions" meaning DOS, UNIX, or Mac, or Unicode (which has its own line endings too). The idea of mixed line endings is hard for them to handle. I wish all these editors would just stop assuming the file needs *any* format and let *me* decide what I want. It really boils down to a model/view confusion that harks back decades. When you separate model/view properly then all this "file format" and "current mode" nonsense just disappears. The find-replace dialogs in OOo do not have enough escape-control characters to do this sort of thing.

Posted by Mark on August 03, 2007 at 11:16 PM CEST #

Thomas said:

Mathias,
comments are closed for your old blog entry http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS/entry/what%27s_up_in_the_writer from 23 Nov 2006, so i have to ask here: is there documentation/information available about features that are planned for implementation to enhance interoperability [especially with MS Word as suggested in your entry]? What features will be/are implemented and in which timeframe will they released?

And what about the attribute for the paragraph outline level? (http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS/entry/make_everything_as_simple_as) Is this still a draft?

Posted by Thomas on August 12, 2007 at 04:53 AM CEST #