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Journal Planesdragon's Journal: OpenOffice Annoyances 13

Journal by Planesdragon
I've tried using OO 1.1 recently, and I've collected a whole slew of new annoyances with it. In no particular order:
  • Bloated PDFs : it's probably not OO's fault per-se, but the PDFs it spits out, at least on windows, are friggin huge--in one case, nearly four times the size of the uncompressed word document original. (edit: the files are "huge" compared to PDFs made with Adobe or PDFedit, not just the original file)
  • No PDF bookmarks : This one i blame on OO. One of the nice things about PDFs is the nested bookmark feature. Unfortunatly, nothing save for Word / Acrobat seems to be able to get these right. If PDF's an open format, how hard can it be to have headings convert to bookmarks?
  • No Smallcaps Key : One of the nice formatting options in Word is "small caps." Where the small letters of a font are replaced with smaller-size capital letters. Open Office supports this--but the only way to turn it on or off is through the "character" window. It should be a toolbar icon and a keyboard shortcut--even if not standard, there should be a handle to make a toolbar icon there.
  • No key command to insert current date in calc : I use a spreadsheet to track my writing time, for my own personal records. Ctrl + ; in excel inputs the current date, with Ctrl + : inserting the current time. This a very handy feature, but there doesn't even to seem to be any command at all to do this on Open Office.
  • No Page Centering: Another feature that isn't there is vertical page centering. Often, like when doing a title page, it's appropriate to center text on a page. The program should take care of this by itself, without resorting to the old standby of using hard returns to move the title section down.
  • Line breaks in outline view : It's not always useful to write a document in text-on-paper view (in fact, this is why I never picked up WordPerfect.) OO's Online Layout view is as close an equivalent to Word's Normal view as it has--but the line breaks are odd. A quotation mark after a period at the end of the line may find itself all alone on the next line down. Rather annoying.
  • Online View and Normal View have linked zoom levels : While working in Online view, I zoomed in to get the text to wrap in a more pleasing fashion. But when I switch back to normal view, the zoom level remains the same. This is annoying, and there's no reason to have this setup this way save for coder simplicity.
  • No Palm support : The only format that OpenOffice works with on the palm is AportisDoc, who went out of business at the end of 2002 and doesn't seem to be free anyway. (If there's an OSS Palm AportisDoc format reader, I'd love to hear about it. Even better would be a XML/HTML editor... )
  • Numberings and Headings don't mesh : I use a set style for chapter headings, and it's useful to use the word processor's numbering function to give the chapter its number. (This helps if a chapter has to move, or if the number of chapters changes.) Unfortunatly, there isn't a simple way to get this effect in OO. I can set the style and numbering up correctly, but they don't end like they should or restart together.
  • Word Counting in OO sucks : There's no real nice way to say this. People who use word processors--who really use them, and couldn't just get buy with wordpad--use word counts. Authors get paid by word counts. Publishers pay by word counts. Friggin school assignments are assigned based on word counts! Getting a word count should be either a glance at a part of the window, a click of a toolbar, or--at worst--the selection of a menu item. I don't know and I don't care why the word count feature is buried on the properties menu, or why it takes so bloody long to do. I just want it to work--even if it takes as long as spellchecking the entire document to get one.

I want to use OpenOffice. I really do. And it's getting better and better--but it's just not quite there yet. (Thankfully, my last major bug--em-dashes getting picked up as letters by the spellchecker--was fixed in 1.1. So I gave it a run through, and thus got this list of things that bug me.)

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OpenOffice Annoyances

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  • No PDF bookmarks : This one i blame on OO. One of the nice things about PDFs is the nested bookmark feature. Unfortunatly, nothing save for Word / Acrobat seems to be able to get these right. If PDF's an open format, how hard can it be to have headings convert to bookmarks?

    I know right. I love kghostview because it's speed, keybindings, looks, and integration into konqueror kick acrobat's ass (even when it's being called from another browser it still kicks acrobat's ass, that things just so slow and ackwa

    • Not only bookmarks, but free-text search as well.

      I don't think any gv-frontend can do it... maybe there's something fundamentally wrong with ghostscripts pdf abilities or something, otherwise how can these simple things be so damn hard to add?

      Xpdf does it right, but the UI is horrid, why don't the KDE/Gnome guys make neat eye candy versions of it instead of ghostview?
  • * Bloated PDFs : it's probably not OO's fault per-se, but the PDFs it spits out, at least on windows, are friggin huge--in one case, nearly four times the size of the uncompressed word document original

    I would guess that your assesment is right with the size issue here. Check out OO.org's file size compared to the MS .doc size though. It is also possible that the PDF library they are using isn't the most efficient. Where I work we take some XML docs and transform them into PDFs and usually get decent f
    • People tend to get a set way of working with a word processor, and they don't like to have to change it too much. The worst part about OoO is when someone tries to do %TASK%, and finds out that either they can't do that, or that it takes three times as many steps to do the same effect--and that they're no way to create an easy shortcut to do it. (I don't consider "make a macro" to be more than a temporary workaround.)

      As for Word Processor automation--IMO, the darn things should run a 'user setup wizard',
    • documentation don't have word count requirements

      Sometimes they do. Heck, I'm so into word counts, I run them on just about everything I write -- and I'm slamming the wordcruncher all day every day, almost. I have actually written documentation with word count specs. I have also written courseware with word count -- and readability scale specs, not to mention documentation and other technical writing that requires adhering to a maximum character count for things like section titles and subject headers.
      • Okey, none of the design docs or documentation *I* have written have had such requirements. :-) It still doesn't change the idea that having them on the properties page of the file makes sense.

        I agree with both of you that it'd be nice to have that setup wizard idea for auto-*. It would be considerabley better than wandering around every menu trying to figure out where the heck certain settings are. Granted, I suppose having a default setup is easier to trouble shoot, cause only an idiot like me would ev
    • I love Frame. I find it far easier to work with for long documents than Word.

      While I don't do design documents or documentation often, I haven't found a better tool than Frame. Every serious technical writer I know either uses Frame or is lobbying their company to buy it. I suspect there is probably a reason.

  • If PDF's an open format, how hard can it be to have headings convert to bookmarks?

    I didn't look this up to verify it, but to the best of my knowledge PDF is not an open format. Just because Adobe has a free cross-platform viewer available doesn't make it "open," right? Likewise, the existence of non-Adobe programs that can read and write PDF doesn't make PDF an "open" format either.

    Look at it this way: do you consider Word an "open" format just because there is a free (though not cross-platform) vi

    • Acording to the folks at Adobe [adobe.com]

      "An open file format specification, PDF is available to anyone who wants to develop tools to create, view, or manipulate PDF documents. Indeed, more than 1,800 vendors offer PDF-based solutions, ensuring that organizations that adopt the PDF standard have a variety of tools to leverage the Portable Document Format and to customize document processes."

      Remember that Adobe also created TIFF and Postscript. Though I don't have a link handy, I do believe that they're as open as
      • Thanks for the explanation - I stand (appreciatively) corrected. But one thing I still don't understand is this: how do non-Microsoft programs (like Open Office) read and write the Word format if that format is not "open"? Do they have to license something from M$?
        • Good old-fashioned reverse engineering.

          MS's doesn't complain about it for the same reason they don't complain about KDE/Gnome stealing their UI enhancments. Not only does it help maintain their network of users, it'd be a great way to lose in court to Apple / Corel if they started bitching.

          Word.DOC is a closed format that, AFAIK, is essentially the same thing that word works with in memory. The programs that read DOCs are great examples of the beneifts of reverse-engineering. Reading someone's file for
  • What's wrong with word count?

    As far as I can see, quick "alt-f + i" bring up the properties window darn fast, and it seems to track the usage so that last viewed tab opens up, so if you previously had the "statistics" tab with word count open, it jumps right into it.

    And even though a-f-i isn't a real quick key for one feature, I'd think that it's still lots of faster than clicking any toolbar icons.

  • Bloated PDFs, No PDF Bookmarks.

    Note that the developers priority seems to be to get basic PDF functionality working. (Type 1 fonts aren't subsetted, for example, and the representation of text is not nearly optimal, which seems to be what causes most of the bloat.) Once that is done and working, they can optimize the result and add features. That's a matter of manpower, though.

    No Smallcaps Key.

    Those are fake small caps, and of the same "quality" as creating bold type through overstrike and "italic

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