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).
Master documents
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.
 
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.
 
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???
 
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.
 
Anchored frames
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:

 
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).
 
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.
 
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.
 
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