This is cool! Does exactly what most people need without any clutter.

Posted by Ralph Aichinger on November 05, 2007 at 06:12 PM CET #

This looks like a really nice idea; I'm sure it will help many people get their work done, which is a very good thing--although they will have to learn about finding, downloading and installing extensions in order to number their pages ;-)

I do find it somewhat, umm, ironic that an extension to handle everyday page numbering is a nice enhancement to the product.

Are extensions a good way to provide core functions?

Is something like this a stepping stone for re-working the built-in UI?

Will some extensions eventually ship along with OpenOffice.org?

Posted by Joe on November 06, 2007 at 04:14 PM CET #

No - yes - maybe.
Put it this way, Charles was faster to provide a solution for this usability glitch than I was. He "simply" used the extension infrastructure to improve OOo instead of choosing the standard procedures of proposing a patch to IssueTracker. And this is perfectly ok. (see http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS/entry/community_building_via_extensions)

In this particular case we should find a way to make this dialog a standard feature of OOo, because you are right: Replacing the hurdle to insert a footer with a page number with the other hurdle to find and install an extension, that eases this function is not a happy end. This shall be continued and the task 60427 is not closed yet.

Posted by Matthias on November 06, 2007 at 06:51 PM CET #

Sweet. :-)

Posted by David Mackey on November 08, 2007 at 03:35 AM CET #

It's one problem with this extension: If some page style is used in document differs from "Default" then this style reset to "Default".

Posted by chkur on November 08, 2007 at 10:46 AM CET #

Chkur is right. This extension use only the default (or standard) page style to handle pagination. This approach is perfect for the novice or the occasionnal user that doesn't understand the page style approach.

But the page style approach is very powerful and cannot be replace by the Pagination extension for everyone. The challenge is to make OOo easier to use for the novice without sacrifying the powerful style approach.

Maybe somebody will find a way to unified the two approach.

Posted by André Cotte on November 12, 2007 at 05:50 PM CET #

Even though this extension appears to have some limitations it adds a feature that I personally missed from MS Word. One less thing I'll miss from using MS-Office :-)
Congratulation's to Charles for it, and I hope the OOo team is able too find a way to add something similar to the core some time in the future.

Posted by Paulo on November 30, 2007 at 01:19 AM CET #

This is a useful tool, but people should understand it's not the only way to do pagination. I've been doing it manually with "Insert Header", "Insert Field-Page Number" for years, without any real difficulty.

Posted by Matthew Flaschen on November 30, 2007 at 09:27 AM CET #

Matthew Flaschen describes the way I add page numbers too, which is so simple that I don't understand how this extension is an improvement? Particularly when you consider additional field requirements such as name or page total, it would seem necessary to be able to control the entire header, not only the page numbers.

What does need work is that the headers tend to disappear when from OpenOffice.org documents I e-mail. Thanks for your consideration.

Posted by cc on December 03, 2007 at 05:36 AM CET #