OOo documents look different

[Simos Xenitellis]

Στις 10-07-2006, ημέρα Δευ, και ώρα 20:54 +0200, ο/η Erwin Rol έγραψε:
> On Mon, 2006-07-10 at 20:26 +0200, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> > Le lundi 10 juillet 2006 à 13:44 -0400, Benjy Grogan a écrit :
> > > On 7/10/06, Nicolas Mailhot <nicolas.mailhot at laposte.net> wrote:
> > 
> > > > The sad thing is people don't care about what you're asking - if they
> > > > did word processing would not have rolled over DTP in the last decade.
> > > > In a word processing context all you have is a text flow (as in
> > > > free-flow).
> > > 
> > > People do care.  I've heard this complaint before.  It's not a concern
> > > when a 27 page document becomes a 28 page document, but when you want
> > > to have 1 page and suddenly that 1 page has become 2 pages and you're
> > > searching for what OS it last fit properly on, then it gets to be a
> > > nuisance.
> > 
> > Well, they don't care enough to buy DTP products, which means word is
> > the only game in town, and writer is just emulating it.
> > 
> > > I'd be happy with a set of fonts that work the same on all OSes, and
> > > then I'd stick with those.  Times New Roman seems like a hassle now.
> > 
> > Even with a single common font you'd have problems :
> > - some other parts of the formatting will have fuzzy definition
> > interpreted slightly differently over time by different software
> > versions.
> > - every system won't interpret the same font the same way (currently
> > Fedora won't use the bytecode interpreter because of patent concerns,
> > Windows will)
> > - fonts are not static : they include instructions for the rendering
> > engines, and as rendering engines get smarter font designers include
> > more complex instructions, which mean display and print approach
> > progressively the font designer ideal, but the size of a given text
> > string will change as a result.
> 
> those are all technical reasons, here we (with we I mean software
> developers, and that includes me) are trying again to find a excuse to
> not make what the user wants. I would dare to bet with you that most
> users expect their ODF (or DOC) documents to look the same even if they
> open them 5 years later with a new version of OOo or Word (of course for
> some documents they might say "oh well strange that it is now 26 instead
> of 25 pages, but of well, probably just a little bug in my new version
> of Word").
> 
> > The page change the poster is complaining about is due to Fedora
> > honoring some font settings it ignored before.
> 
> What ever the reason is, the software's way of working changed in a bad
> way, so this "fix" did not fix anything it broke things. 
> 
> > Right now the only game in town if you don't use a DTP-like product with
> > transparent fit-to-frame scaling is to reserve enough blank space on the
> > page to account to the slight rendering variations between office
> > suites.
> 
> Not an option for multi-page documents. BTW differently rendered
> multi-page documents can be very confusing too, for example think about
> a meeting where 3 ppl open a document, one on a mac, one on windows one
> on XP, and than say; "Now all look at page 25 where you will see ...."
> good luck finding out where the text is that is shown on page 25 by one
> of the ppl.
> 
> For me, not rendering documents correct in a word processing application
> is a _fatal_ bug. Changing the way old documents are rendered is even
> more fatal. Copying this behavior from Microsoft (if Word even has that
> behavior which i would not dare to bet about!) is not a good thing to
> do. 
> 
> But since i have no idea how to fix it, I will not continue to bug ppl
> with it. And sounding by the arguments on why it is displaying documents
> incorrect it seems OOo is just broken by design, so there is nothing
> easy to fix in the first place. 

It's difficult to say without seeing some sample documents.
It's common that some documents are written in such a way that makes
them fragile to slight variations of system settings.

For example, there are documents that are written without specifying
styles; to make the pagination they use blank lines instead of page
breaks.

Having some minimal sample docs would be great to pinpoint issues.

Simos