LO 3.5 - Can't see page margins in Writer

users
#41

Hi Regina,

I hope you didn't take my previous words as a personal attack, which they weren't.

If I understand it right, the boundaries are only needed to align
pictures with the mouse. If that is true, I think, a better solution
would be not bringing back the border lines, but add a snapping feature.
So that you can not only snap to grid (who uses that and to what
purpose?) but snap to layout relevant positions, for example to
paragraph border, indent position, page border, explicit tabs.

What do you think?

The boundaries are another visual clue to what's on the page. I see them as useful as the unprintable characters are: a necessity when laying a page out.

I fail to see any use to the "angles" (don't know the actual name for these things) as they are currently implemented. If others can do with them, it's ok with me, no problem, as much as there are actually people working with hidden unprintable chars. The best of both worlds would be to display the (good ol') text boundaries according to the unprintable chars switch.

My two cents. Well, I hope for some more :slight_smile:

#42

Do you mean you never display the unprintable chars?

#43

Hi Thorsten,

Jean-Francois Nifenecker wrote:

The place where to bring questions to the devs has to be a visible
and accessible place.

[...]

I guess there's some work to be done to resolve those two points.

not necessarily - what would be equally workable is a group of
change agents (Regina, Cor, NoOp, you in this case, but also UX
people like Christoph), who have their eyes& ears here and at the
forums and convey to ux-advise or the dev list.

Good point and certainly a workable intermediate option. Unfortunately, reading some of the msgs on UX lead me to think the devs aren't ready for that.

Also, what would greatly reduce the cost& friction that changes
will cause in the future, is early feedback.

Granted.

We invested quite some
resources into providing nightly builds here:

  http://dev-builds.libreoffice.org/daily/

(and my, and other hackers' personal time and money to keep those
hosts running), so any suggestion to have people actually download&
play with those builds greatly appreciated.

I, for one, have no time enough to play with all the toys that come up in the Libre software world. I happen to download and test LibO builds, but that's not on a regular basis and much of what I learn is from others' mouths.

Cedric blogged his feature here:

  http://cedric.bosdonnat.free.fr/wordpress/?p=818

(that's also aggregated on planet.documentfoundation.org),

Yes, but that blog article (like most of the msgs that were posted on the lists) was aimed at headers and footers, not text boundaries that I feel are considered as some kind of a "sub-product" from the latter. I did participate on the FR discussion list to the header/footer talks but, at that time, left completely apart the text boundaries. I should have been more vocal about that, certainly, but I stood on topic... :frowning:

but
possibly we could do better spreading the word - would someone
(you?) be interested in compiling a weekly or monthly newsletter for
LibreOffice?

More simply: give more visibility to the UX list. I share your thoughts that given it's aim, many won't subscribe. But those interested will know of its existence.

Thanks for jumping in indeed - well, you *did* it yourself. Let's
see where that (constructive) discussion gets us to.

<sigh>

Thanks for your time,

#44

Absolutely not.
Everything has a time and a place.

The time for the entire page including its edge may be preview mode to some, just not me.
No doubt, I would never try to make a database form document with out looking very carefully at every unprintable character I could find.

#45

Are you advocating WYSIWYG? This is diametrically wrong.

If you are looking at the appearance of a document, you can have no idea what it will look like after you add a single character to make that final editing correction: the amount of consequential change is unlimited. If you are instead looking at the structure of a document, you may not know its precise appearance either before or after the edit, but you can be sure that both appearances will be what you are happy with.

Brian Barker

#46

I've opened a bug report regarding the issue:
<https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=46305>
[Text Boundaries have been replaced by page only Crop Marks]
and attached a PDF showing the difference between LO 3.5, LO 3.4, and
Microsoft Word 2010.

Note: I was curious about this statment in
<http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/DocumentBorder>:

"Competitor Study

    MS Office 2003/2007/2010 : Put marks on four corners of page, to
show the boder of documents."

Which, apparently was the basis for the change, as I understand it.
Unfortunately whoever wrote that (Ma Li?) apparently didn't understand
that those are 'Crop Marks' in Microsoft Word (including Word 2010).

So I downloaded Microsoft Office 2010 (trial version) to test/compare &
posted the results to the bug report.

#47

Hallo Regina ,

I agree, the current grid could be replaced by a "editable grid" who can been adapted to the multiple columns boundaries and to place also "horizontal" boundaries.
Very good idea !
Ideal for our workflow

New systems and idea's has advantages, but please let us, users, choose the system who fit best to our workflows. This is not very hard to do, 3 buttons in the appearance,
- no boundarys >> now use the editabel grid
- the new look ( corner boundarys)
-the old boundarys

Thanks for the interrest

Frernand