Why StarWriter (6.0 and OpenOffice 1.0 Writer) is not useful for (professional)
writing
With StarOffice 6 we have a multi-platform and open-source office suite
with public file format and APIs for task automation and interfacing with
external software. However, still in version 6 there are two main obstacles
for Star/Open-Office being successful as a widely used and accepted alternative
to other applications such as MS Office. These two issues, master documents
and anchored frames, are described in some detail below. The solution is
simple: Add the concepts of Books and Float to as provided
in FrameMaker.
Major problems
These are the problems that simply need to be solved to make StarWriter
useful for long documents. The comments on master documents is mainly written
by Harvey Turnbull (@ntlworld.com).
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Master documents
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Book construction, particularly software documentation, can often be the
product of several contributors, when separate chapters need to be combined.
The use of a word processor to generate the contributions (chapters), as
opposed to a dedicated DTP application, is often more convenient. Word
is not particularly reliable when faced with this task, and I had hoped
that StarWriter - which claims to be "a powerful and easy-to-use desktop
publishing creation tool - with advanced capabilities for creating multi-file
books..." - would have offered a more professional solution.
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However, I'm afraid that what I found in MD mode is rather an amateurish
attempt to provide the tools necessary for such a task, lacking a true
overall Master Document philosophy, evidenced by conflicting working methods.
In an effective Master Document method of working, Files (Chapters) and
Illustrations (Graphics) should be included via pointers to linked files.
SO does this OK. However, two way editing of Files should be possible.
This is where, as far as I can determine, SO falls down. Working in MD
mode, one needs to be able to apply all the global commands to organise
book structure, and to edit the content when necessary in MD mode.
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When saving the Master Document, all changes should be saved within the
sub documents. This doesn't happen. One is, apparently, not allowed to
make changes to constituent chapters within MD mode - one must open the
chapters separately and then reimport them - tedious! However, there is
a facility to make changes in MD mode - double clicking on the file name
of a chapter in the status bar brings up an Edit Sections dialog in which
one can uncheck Protected under Write Protection. This enables one to make
changes within chapters. However, it appears to be totally pointless -
ones changes aren't saved - so why is it provided???
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We think you need to completely rethink Master Document mode so that it
has a properly functioning overall design philosophy - ideally, everything
should be possible in MD mode with all the components, text and graphics,
properly linked, but subordinate to it. As it stands, I get the impression
that it is nothing more than an attempt to add a feature to what is basically
a word processing application, but that commands have been added on an
ad hoc basis. This is Word's problem - all the possibilities within Word
of constructing a book require constant readjustment - the controls are
just not powerful enough. If you were to create a Master Document mode
that really worked, you would have Word users changing to StarOffice in
droves! And if you want to see how to do it, study Corel's Ventura Publisher
or Adobe's FrameMaker.
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Anchored frames
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Assume you write a long documents, wither structured as a book or simply
a longer report. Figures are inserted via frames, which in turn contains
figures and captions. As in any book with figures, they are often put at
the top or bottom of the page text area. However, to do so in StarWriter,
you have to anchor the frame to the page, but then it is anchored to that
page,
loosing the anchoring to the point of interest in the text. Then if text
(could be many pages) is inserted before that point, the figure stays on
the original page. Moving it manually includes finding where in the text
it is referenced. In MS Word there is kind of a remedy: A frame positioned
on the page can still be bound to the text by selecting "Lock anchor" in
the Frame menu:
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There is also a Move with text option but that cannot be combined with
page anchoring; it is related to anchoring to paragraph in Star. In Word,
however, the text area between the anchoring point and the bottom of the
page (when anchoring as in the figure) is not filled (with text from the
next page) when the vertical distance is smaller than the height of the
frame. In other words, it is not really a floating frame (in Star 5.2,
so called floating frames was available but badly working and not useful).
In practice, writing long documents in Star Office is a waste of efforts
and time (costed me several weeks so far).
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In FrameMaker you can specify any anchored frame to be "floating", and
the select to where it should float (for instance "top of next available
column). Text formatting then works as expected without manual tuning.
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If you think features like paragraph breaks, widow, and orphan control
solves this problem you haven't understood, do some more thinking and try
things out. There are reasons for these features in FrameMaker and Word.
The very best would be to have the same support for figures, tables, and
captions (including the [tbhp] floating preferences) as in TeX/LaTeX, bit
I guess that is to hope too much.
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It should be no problem including the required features in such a way that
mapping to and from Word is supported, with some loss of formatting when
Word is not sufficient of course.
Minor problems
There are a lot of other problems remaining in StarOffice, but they are
possible to live with (doing manual tuning, using invisible fonts in styles,
etc.) and no application works perfectly. And without improving on the
two issues above, there is no use in reporting minor deficiencies since
the program is not useful anyway. Possibly/hopefully, I'll add a list of
minor problems here....
Final note
If the above major problems are important, why aren't they discussed in
the openoffice.org newsgroups? One cannot expect beta-testers or existing
Star users to put these issues forward; this has to do with larger documents
and professional writing so input is needed from those not using (or not
being able to use) Star Office today. Within Sun, I understand from the
fact that they have developed FrameMaker Java Doclets, they use FrameMaker
to some extent (for customer documentation I assume, like in other companies
I know). Let those writers try StarWriter and I'm sure they will agree.
Is anyone in the open source community interested in solving these issues???
Klas Nilsson (http://www.cs.lth.se/~klas)
2002-05-20