Battle of the Office Suites: Microsoft Office and LibreOffice Compared

users
#21

Really? You want to be able to write a 20-page PARAGRAPH? I'm not sure
even James Joyce would have been up to that task. Now show me the person
who's going to read it!

I heard that in some countries it is actually legal requirement that
stenography from court case is to be written without any paragraph breaks.
And even if this is not true, there is no point in turning limitation into
strength. LO Writer does not allow paragraphs longer than certain size,
period. If this limitation has been discovered, there was someone that
actually needed longer paragraphs for whatever reason.

I think custom language might be somehow valid point, too. Maybe not entire
language, but definitely wordbook. If you write a novel, you don't want you
character names to be underlined by spell checker. But when you write article
to local newspaper, you want the same words to be marked as mistakes.
So there is need for different wordbooks and ability to disable them on the fly.
I am not sure how LO handle that.

I wouldn't dare to create index in Writer, but then this is yet another
limitation. Some people care about it.

So far, Urmas has some valid points. There are things that MS Office can do, but
which LO can't. They might be corner cases, they might seem unrealistic, but
someone somewhere might need them sometime. We should acknowledge them as
limitations, because that's what they are. After all, no software is perfect.

       What are the requirements to become an LO developer?

       I don't know about LO, but with R (www.r-project.org), anyone can contribute a package to enhance the basic language. If you want to change a feature of the core language, you need to work with the core developers, convince at least one of them that your proposed change would be an enhancement, and that it's worth that person's time to implement it. The latter can be facilitated by providing working code that passes all the standard checks.

       Spencer Graves

#22

You seem to be disappointed that LibreOffice cannot do something which it actually achieves very well. Language is a character property, a character style property, and a paragraph style property (but not a paragraph property, although an entire paragraph can be given a language setting using the character property, of course). You can set the language of words, phrases, sentences, whole paragraphs, or whatever differently from their surrounding text in many ways. Providing you have the appropriate dictionaries installed, everything works as you would want. You can even mark the language of your character names as "None (Do not check spelling)".

Or did you mean something else?

Brian Barker

#23

"Brian Barker":

You can set the language of words, phrases, sentences,

whole paragraphs, or whatever differently from their surrounding text in many ways.

...and their list is hard-coded. Unlike MSO...

#24

You seem to be disappointed that LibreOffice cannot do something
which it actually achieves very well.

Please do not confuse me with Urmas.
I, personally, am not disappointed with LO; at least not in the fields we are
talking about right now. I have never had need for long paragraphs or
document-specific dictionary.
But then, just because I do not need them, does not mean that they are not
valid enhancement requests. I only acknowledge that someone might care about
them and see LO as inferior product.

Or did you mean something else?

*I* meant something else. Not sure about Urmas.

What I was talking about, is simple use case:
I write this sci-fi novel in English. One of characters is named "Valtirix".
Since "Valtirix" is not English word (after all, he's from planet "Betighyy"),
spell-checker will underline it. But this is valid word in my novel, so I do
not want that.
I can add it to custom dictionary, fine.
But again, I do not want to put "Valtirix" by mistake anywhere in letter to my
grandpa. So, in documents other than my novel, I want this word to be
underlined, because it is not correct.

What I am talking about, is custom dictionary that might be laid on top of
language dictionary and enabled on the fly.
And, as I said, I, personally, never actually needed that, so it might be that
LO is already capable of doing this. But if it is not, then this is valid
enhancement request.

#25

You seem to be disappointed that LibreOffice cannot do something which it actually achieves very well.

Please do not confuse me with Urmas.

Oh, I didn't, I didn't! I was answering the paragraph I quoted, which was entirely yours.

Or did you mean something else?

*I* meant something else. Not sure about Urmas.

Can we forget him, please?

What I was talking about, is simple use case: I write this sci-fi novel in English. One of characters is named "Valtirix". Since "Valtirix" is not English word (after all, he's from planet "Betighyy"), spell-checker will underline it. But this is valid word in my novel, so I do not want that. I can add it to custom dictionary, fine. But again, I do not want to put "Valtirix" by mistake anywhere in letter to my grandpa. So, in documents other than my novel, I want this word to be underlined, because it is not correct.

What I am talking about, is custom dictionary that might be laid on top of language dictionary and enabled on the fly.

LibreOffice can do all of that, I think.

The quick way - if your novel is a single document - is simply to use Ignore All instead of Ignore. Then all correct spellings of your character name will be unmarked anywhere in the document.

Otherwise, you can create a custom dictionary, as you ask:
o Go to Tools | Options... | Language Settings | Writing Aids | User-defined dictionaries.
o Click New... and give your new dictionary a name ("Novel"?).
o Tick the box next to your new dictionary to enable it.
Now, as you encounter words you want to be treated as acceptable, use right-click | Add > | Novel.dic. When you write to your grandfather, remove the tick from this dictionary.

Note that the choices at Tools | Options... | Language Settings | Writing Aids | User-defined dictionaries apply to LibreOffice until they are changed. What you may prefer is to have those settings saved *per document*, so your Novel dictionary would apply to your novel but not your grandparental correspondence without further action - but I don't see that this is possible in LibreOffice. But the Ignore All technique saves the extra words in the document, so you do get that advantage with that method.

I trust this helps.

Brian Barker

#26

Well, that would be it :slight_smile: .
Although I like to think of myself as power-user of Writer, I must admit that
this is one of settings where I have never looked carefully. And it does
exactly what I have described.

Thanks for this tip!

#27

Hi :slight_smile:
I feel like singing something from "Gilbert and Sullivan" (prolly mis-seplt that)  "and is the very model of an ..." or the lumberjacks song from Monty Python.

Luckily voice doesn't carry very well over text-based communications and also luckily i can't remember many (or any?) of the words.

I think it's fairly easy to join the devs but there is some support for noobs, such as the "Easy Hacks" page so people can try out a bit of coding first and then get advice from a mentor.  If the code is good enough it might be put forwards but it might take a few times before the noobs writes code that is really good enough for that.  Once put forwards the wider group is likely to be able to have a look and make comments if they feel the need.  Then there are various testing phases before the coding gets into the main branch and if the coding makes it through all that then there are various stages of alpha and then beta testing.

So the question is less about what are the requirements of the person and more about what are the requirements for the quality of the code they write.

Anyone can become an LO dev but only the truly heroic can get their coding into common usage.

Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

<snip />

#28

In data domenica 18 agosto 2013 02:43:29, Urmas ha scritto:

What a ridiculous article. The LO suite inadequacy is clear to any who
worked with it more than 15 minutes. The reason for this is implementing
features by an order from Sun/Oracle/RH/whatever or by cargo-cult feature
transfer. It is clear that no one actually did their work with it by
themselves.

Ahahahahahah!!! Boom!!!