Difference between revisions of "FeatureSuggestions"

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{|style="background-color: #fee; margin: 0 1em; padding: 0 10px; border: 1px solid #aaa;"
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|-
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| rowspan="4" valign="top" | [[File:Documentation_caution.png]]
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||'''Please note: This is a dead-end page.'''
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This page will never "''serve as a source of inspiration for developers and contributors''" for 2 reasons:
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* This page is '''not''' part of the development cycle i.e. is not the place where feature requests are tracked.
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* This page has no known readers other than the people who express their wishes on it i.e the developers do not read this page.
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'''Where should I submit my wishes for enhancements then?'''
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# [http://www.openoffice.org/servlets/Login Log in] to openoffice.org.
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# Do a [http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/query.cgi query] in the issue database to be '''sure that your wish has not already been reported'''.
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# Write an issue as '''ENHANCMENT''' or '''FEATURE'''.
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This page has been locked to prevent further edits.
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|}
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REQUEST TO MERGE THIS PAGE WITH [[Feature:Requests]].
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== Draft print mode ==
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The current printing with reduce data solution to draft type printing is not user friendly. Please implement something that has a simple style of a "Draft Print" check box on the print page.
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== Adapt to widescreen interfaces ==
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Screens with a 16:10 oder 16:9 display ratio become more and more common (especially in the notebook sector). A pivot function of said displays cannot be taken for granted. For the display of most pages there is an abundance of space in the horizontal direction, however, vertical space is extremely limited.
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Most function bars can be positioned vertically, however, some of them lose functionality in the process. It would be wise to adapt those bars to widescreen displays, e.g. by providing the option to chose a rectangular shape for the "bars", yet still having them dock to the window and to each other.
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A 4:3 and a separate widescreen standard view for the function bars should be provided.
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== Improve update interface ==
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Allow the removal of specific items from the ''Updates for extensions'' dialog.
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As it currently stands if one unchecks an item the "Install" button becomes grayed out, leaving the users with only the "Cancel" option. This means that the next time OOo is launched, that the user is again prompted with "Updates to extensions are available" notice which is very annoying. Apple's OS X allows specific updates to be removed from consideration (i.e. not installed, but taken off the list), with users having the option to restore to the list of available updates those items they have previously removed.
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== Calendering/Communications/etc. ==
 
== Calendering/Communications/etc. ==
 
There were talks about integrated OOo with Thunderbird...but I'd like to point-out "SpiceBird" which is already surpassing it, but utilizing Thunderbird, Sunbird, and other useful components...http://www.spicebird.com/ and I hope it'll garner interest.  
 
There were talks about integrated OOo with Thunderbird...but I'd like to point-out "SpiceBird" which is already surpassing it, but utilizing Thunderbird, Sunbird, and other useful components...http://www.spicebird.com/ and I hope it'll garner interest.  
  
== Margin Notes ==
 
 
Scenario: Notes/Comments in a writer document are difficult to find and read
 
  
We need to put our notes expanded in the margins so we can see them. See the [http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Summer_of_Code_2007#Writer:_Better_.22Notes.22_functionality summer of code project] for this.
 
  
 
== Photo Album ==
 
== Photo Album ==
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The idea is that openoffice.org would automatically look up phrases in your document (possibly automatically, or possibly only at a users direction) in wikipedia and see if they have an article written about this content, if so highlight them with a special link which takes you to the wikipedia article about it. e.g. reading a document about Russian History and "Peter the Great" automatically link to background information about Peter on wikipedia. Or firefox style, a sidebar accumulates the links.
 
The idea is that openoffice.org would automatically look up phrases in your document (possibly automatically, or possibly only at a users direction) in wikipedia and see if they have an article written about this content, if so highlight them with a special link which takes you to the wikipedia article about it. e.g. reading a document about Russian History and "Peter the Great" automatically link to background information about Peter on wikipedia. Or firefox style, a sidebar accumulates the links.
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::AWESOME. me wants this!--[[User:Viceroy321|Viceroy321]] 14:07, 3 May 2009 (UTC)
  
 
== Better Template Dialog ==
 
== Better Template Dialog ==
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===="Next slide preview" in presentations====
 
===="Next slide preview" in presentations====
 
The possibility to see on the monitor the next slide of the presentation while the actual presentation is running on screen.
 
The possibility to see on the monitor the next slide of the presentation while the actual presentation is running on screen.
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I believe this is '''completed'''. See OpenOffice.org Presenter Console extension (openoffice.org-presenter-console package.)
  
 
====New 3D effects====
 
====New 3D effects====
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Add to that the ability to trigger some sort of automatic "commit on save" functionality and you have undos across sessions.  Me want!
 
Add to that the ability to trigger some sort of automatic "commit on save" functionality and you have undos across sessions.  Me want!
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== Sqlite support in OpenOffice.org ==
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Offer Sqlite (http://www.sqlite.org/) support.
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SQLite is a software library that implements a self-contained, serverless, zero-configuration, transactional SQL database engine. SQLite is the most widely deployed SQL database engine in the world. The source code for SQLite is in the public domain.
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Sqlite is easier to migrate with PHP based web applications than current solutions.
  
 
== Document Encryption (GPG) ==
 
== Document Encryption (GPG) ==
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: Personally, I'd like to see a way that, once I'm in the Format > Character box, it will let me choose Small Caps without taking my hands off the keyboard.  -- [[User:TimNelson|TimNelson]] 23:48, 7 March 2008 (CET)
 
: Personally, I'd like to see a way that, once I'm in the Format > Character box, it will let me choose Small Caps without taking my hands off the keyboard.  -- [[User:TimNelson|TimNelson]] 23:48, 7 March 2008 (CET)
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Keyboard short cuts need to be more flexible.  Arbitrary creation of two-key shortcuts (e.g. Ctrl+r, a) would be extremely useful, boosting usability and typing speed (when integrating typing with formatting).
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Ability to attach short cuts to toolbar buttons would boost efficiency.
  
 
== Real Indexing ==
 
== Real Indexing ==
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It would be nice to be able to switch the find/replace, as well as other places where regexps are used, to be either greedy or not greedy.
 
It would be nice to be able to switch the find/replace, as well as other places where regexps are used, to be either greedy or not greedy.
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::Come on, that usually is only a matter of adding [^x] (substitute x for whatever is appropriate) to the regexp. I'd say thats pretty low priority.
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But wait, see http://user.services.openoffice.org/en/forum/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=23030&p=105024 for one practical example where this is needed.
  
 
== Password protect .odb openoffice.org database documents ==
 
== Password protect .odb openoffice.org database documents ==
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Right now I browse down the font list and there is - Trebuchet MS... Trebuchet MS Bold... Trebuchet MS Bold Italic....Trebuchet MS Italic.... - I would like to see Open-Office become a little smarter, and detect that this is all one font (even though they are separate font files) When I hit the bold button, Open office should switch to the bold font...... Does this not make sence? So the list would look like this - Trebuchet MS! - And then I can hit the bold button or the italic button if I want it bolded or italicized. For features Open Office might not be able to deal with such as extra bold and ultra light, the fonts could be left in the font list.[[User:Drsassafras|Drsassafras]] 18:43, 1 October 2008 (CEST)
 
Right now I browse down the font list and there is - Trebuchet MS... Trebuchet MS Bold... Trebuchet MS Bold Italic....Trebuchet MS Italic.... - I would like to see Open-Office become a little smarter, and detect that this is all one font (even though they are separate font files) When I hit the bold button, Open office should switch to the bold font...... Does this not make sence? So the list would look like this - Trebuchet MS! - And then I can hit the bold button or the italic button if I want it bolded or italicized. For features Open Office might not be able to deal with such as extra bold and ultra light, the fonts could be left in the font list.[[User:Drsassafras|Drsassafras]] 18:43, 1 October 2008 (CEST)
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:Ok. I now see that Open-Office does do this...kinda. Perhaps bringing all the fonts under one name would be nice. But, greying out all the options that are not there. For example if a font can not be bolded, grey out the bold button. This way people can see what there options are. Or a '''B''' , ''I'' , etc. could be shown beside the font name in the font list. So people know what options are available before hand. In my mind though, just greying out the non-selectable options is enough.
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:One more thought in this instance. For fonts like regular, demibold, bold, ExtraBold... The Bold button could toggle between them. Maybe the icon could change a bit to let people know that there is different grades of bold underneath the bold button. Instead of one '''B''' in the icon, there could be 2 '''B'''s overlapping with different amounts of boldness. [[User:Drsassafras|Drsassafras]] 14:49, 10 October 2008 (CEST)
  
 
== Crossref showing Listitem Number ==
 
== Crossref showing Listitem Number ==
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would be 1.2.3 or whatever, depending on how deeply
 
would be 1.2.3 or whatever, depending on how deeply
 
nested was the targeted listitem.
 
nested was the targeted listitem.
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== Fit To Page ==
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A feature I really miss is the "fit to page" feature that I used years ago with word perfect. It will fit your document to a certain number of pages. Very handy. You tell it what it can mess around with margins, line height, font-size, character spacing, etc. Used it all the time. Great results. Rally miss it. [[User:Drsassafras|Drsassafras]] 06:10, 5 October 2008 (CEST)
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== Formatting ==
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Add to ''Change Case:'' Sentence case and Title Case.
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== Document as Email - Choose in what format to send document ==
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When emailing documents, would be nice if ComboBox drops down making it possible to choose Openoffice.org format or Pdf or Microsoft Office.
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== True Print Preview instead of Page Preview ==
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Page Preview currently only works for the full page. Printing allows you to print selections with no way to preview the output of you are actually going to send to the printer which is frequently less than a full page.
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== Impress Zoom Feature ==
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In Impress, it is quite usual to use high zoom levels to arrange your items on a slide. (To me,) The easiest way to zoom in and out is is to use the mouse wheel while pressing Ctrl. The behaviour right now is that one tick of the scroll wheel will change the zoom level by 10%. This is a good step for zoom levels around 100%, since the difference between two ticks is also about 10% (e.g. change from 100% to 110%). However, for higher zoom levels, the difference betweent two ticks becomes ever smaller, at a zoom level of 500% one tick will change it to 510%, which corresponds to a relative change of only 2%. As can be seen from this example, zooming in with the mouse wheel becomes the slower, the higher the absolute zoom factor, which is not a desirable effect and makes working with this feature quite slow.
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My proposal would be to change this behavior in the following way: one tick of the mouse wheel always changes the zoom level by 10% of the value of the current zoom level, i.e. at a zoom level of 100%, one tick still changes the zoom level to 110%, while at a zoom level of 500%, one tick changes the zoom level to 550%.
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-- [[User:Stax|Stax]] 14:16, 2 February 2009 (CET)
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== Writer Zoom positioning ==
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Currently in openoffice.org writer 3.0 zooming with works this way: after zooming out focus gets lost and zooming in always moves screen to the first page whenever cursor actually was before zooming.
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So, if user on 5th page performs ctrl+wheeldown just to see page and adjacent pages, does no clicks, then performs ctrl+wheelup to return to editing back, the first page is zoomed. This is inconvinient and makes user scroll down back to 5th page.
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Probably zooming in should zoom to point where cursor is, not to top left corner of first page
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== OpenOffice.org Presenter Console scroll wheel ==
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The scroll wheel does not work for the OpenOffice.org Presenter Console. At least it doesn't work for the "slides" view of the presentation.
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== Continuous/Proportional Formatting ==
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A feature I've always wanted in a spreadsheet program is a continuous form of conditional formatting.  I would like to be able to make a cell's formatting a linear combination of two different cell styles, determined by how big the number in the cell is.  Numbers in a spreadsheet could be made physically larger if they represent a larger number, or more statistically significant numbers could be highlighted more yellow.  This would allow a new form of data visualization in the spreadsheet itself, and could be one of those critical "I can't believe we ever lived without this" features.
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Only details follow:
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The implementation, as I see it, would be a seperate menu item called "proportional formatting" or "continuous formatting" (If you have another idea for the name put it here please: _____,_____,_____ ).  In the subsequent dialog, the user can create multiple proportional formatting entries (ideally an unrestricted amount).  To define an entry, the user selects the two cell styles they want to interpolate between, and two numbers (formula boxes to be more general) that define the endpoints of the range.
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Let's call those numbers A and B and the cell styles Sa and Sb.  For simplicity, let's make a number x, that says how far along from Sa to Sb the current cell's formatting should be (Normally between 0 and 1, where 0=>Sa, 1=>Sb).  If the selected cell's contents (the one we're formatting) is C, then x = (how far, from A to B, C is) = (C-A)/(B-A).  Then, the cell's formatting would be x*Sb+(1-x)*Sa.
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You'd probably need to truncate x between the range 0 and 1 to prevent invalid cell formatting from happening.
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Optional: The dialog could have radial buttons to select between linear interpolation, logarithmic, exponential, etc.  This would be applied to the value x before the x*Sb+(1-x)*Sa formula, to allow people to emphasize different parts of the range.  The feature would be useful without the ability to select these different mappings.
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== Calc:  Table Header Multiple Filter Selecting Capability  ==
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A very useful feature to help sort data in calc is to filter based on multiple criteria when a table is setup w/ filterable headers.  Currently, I personally get exports from others from MS Excel.  When I go to sort the data, I can only select ONE parameter at a time.  To help clarify, see:
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http://web.engr.oregonstate.edu/~dieringc/RANDOM/filter.png
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It would be nice to include multiple selections in the filter.
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The provided screenshot is a native .xls opened in calc.
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== Writer: Collapse paragraph and/or sections  ==
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Include a right vertical bar with "+/-" to collapse (folde) each section. This feature is also known as
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[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding_editor "folding editor"]. It could be an option to be activated in the view menu.
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== Writer: View/Hide section option on navigator  ==
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Include a view/hide option on the section list in the navigator, to be accessed from the pop-up menu. The current view/hide requires to many clicks to acess the corresponding menu, whereas the sections as listed and managed in the navigator anyway.
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== Writer: Show differences with previous version when saving ==
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Include a feature to show the differences with the currently saved version when saving on the same file. This will be useful when coming back to a document opened for a while, for which you do not remember if you have made any changes or if you just typed some text on it by error.
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== Writer: text mode ouput ==
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Include a feature (in a separate binary) to show the text on a terminal, similar to [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiword Antiword] for showing the text of documents instantaneously, without having to open windows. It is useful when your are looking for a document on a remote server in SSH, for scripting (indexing features)...
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== Writer: start parameter compare docs ==
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Include a feature to have a start parameter for comparing to files. This can be useful, if you want to use other software like eclipse and you want to compare two versions of a document.
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== Writer: Richer Mail Merge ==
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The current MailMerge functionality only allows generating an address block.  This doesn't allow for richer customizations inside the body of text.  A fully featured Mail Merge should accept as input a CSV (or some other form of ordered data).  Then, in the document, you should be able to insert a column name through the MailMerge interface.  Then, when you do the merge, the data from that column will be substituted into that place in the document.  Ideally, it would also included logical statements (ie, if a certain column is blank, add a comma here).
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== Writer: Vim Mode ==
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Add support for modal editing in the style of Vim.
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== Writer: Hide space between pages ==
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Currently, in Writer, there is no way to disable showing the space between pages (or, if there is, it isn't under "view" or anywhere else that I could find).  This means that a document that includes many page breaks but not much content is hard to display compactly on one page.
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== Writer: Show Page Break nonprinting character ==
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It is possible to display most nonprinting characters (paragraph end, space, tab, etc), but it is not possible to display the page-break character.  This means that, for instance, it is impossible to tell where page breaks are in web view. 
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== Writer: Add Reading View ==
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High school and college policy debaters who read evidence on their laptops require a reading view.  This view would allow navigating pages using the arrow keys (down or right would go one page forward; left or up would go one page back).  Home would go to page 1; end would go to the last page; page up and down would work the same as the arrow keys; pressing enter or spacebar would also move one page down; using a mouse with a scroll wheel could also turn the page up or down; escape would exit reading mode. 
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Ideal addition features include:
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-the ability to edit the document while in the reading mode by clicking on the text and then typing.  Pressing escape once would go back to reading mode.
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-the ability to display two pages side by side
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-the ability to display the document map ("navigator") while in reading mode or to disable it
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-the ability to make the reading mode occupy the full Open Office window ie, hide the chrome at the top)
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== Writer: Hide individual sub-headings in Navigator ==
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High school and college policy debaters heavily use the navigator to jump around large documents that are organized with headings.  When one of those documents includes many levels of headings and subheadings, it is hard to use in Open Office because it is impossible to collapse a particular node.  Now, if you right click on the headings part of Navigator, you can choose the outline level, which will collapse everything down to that level, but that isn't very useful because it works globally.  If I have 10 headings at outline level 1 and each of those have 10 headings at outline level 2, I probably want to only display level 1 on 9 out of the 10 level 1 headings, but I will want to display level 2 headings that are the children of one of the level 1 headings.
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To achieve this, put a little +/- icon to the left of each heading so that you can expand or collapse that one heading.  It would work similar to how "Headings" has a +/- icon to the left of it so that you can choose to look at the Headings part of Navigator.

Latest revision as of 08:59, 10 January 2011

Documentation caution.png Please note: This is a dead-end page.

This page will never "serve as a source of inspiration for developers and contributors" for 2 reasons:

  • This page is not part of the development cycle i.e. is not the place where feature requests are tracked.
  • This page has no known readers other than the people who express their wishes on it i.e the developers do not read this page.

Where should I submit my wishes for enhancements then?

  1. Log in to openoffice.org.
  2. Do a query in the issue database to be sure that your wish has not already been reported.
  3. Write an issue as ENHANCMENT or FEATURE.

This page has been locked to prevent further edits.

REQUEST TO MERGE THIS PAGE WITH Feature:Requests.

Contents

Draft print mode

The current printing with reduce data solution to draft type printing is not user friendly. Please implement something that has a simple style of a "Draft Print" check box on the print page.

Adapt to widescreen interfaces

Screens with a 16:10 oder 16:9 display ratio become more and more common (especially in the notebook sector). A pivot function of said displays cannot be taken for granted. For the display of most pages there is an abundance of space in the horizontal direction, however, vertical space is extremely limited.

Most function bars can be positioned vertically, however, some of them lose functionality in the process. It would be wise to adapt those bars to widescreen displays, e.g. by providing the option to chose a rectangular shape for the "bars", yet still having them dock to the window and to each other.

A 4:3 and a separate widescreen standard view for the function bars should be provided.


Improve update interface

Allow the removal of specific items from the Updates for extensions dialog.

As it currently stands if one unchecks an item the "Install" button becomes grayed out, leaving the users with only the "Cancel" option. This means that the next time OOo is launched, that the user is again prompted with "Updates to extensions are available" notice which is very annoying. Apple's OS X allows specific updates to be removed from consideration (i.e. not installed, but taken off the list), with users having the option to restore to the list of available updates those items they have previously removed.

Calendering/Communications/etc.

There were talks about integrated OOo with Thunderbird...but I'd like to point-out "SpiceBird" which is already surpassing it, but utilizing Thunderbird, Sunbird, and other useful components...http://www.spicebird.com/ and I hope it'll garner interest.


Photo Album

Scenario: Photos get taken at a wedding

Part 1 (complete) is to be able to quickly turn them into a presentation to show at the wedding dinner a few hours later. The key features are to be able to create a presentation from the pictures with 3 to 4 clicks with random fades between slides, and the presentation automatically set to loop continuously. Impress Photo Album Creator is a fine starting place for this. Needs to be at least turned into a complete addon which can be installed from the addon menu.

complete: See Jan's Photo Album add-on. Just use the built in extension manager to install the .zip


Part 2 is to be able to export such a presentation into a video format of some kind, so it can then be imported into some 3rd party DVD writing software to burn as a playable DVD as a gift for the non-techy not computer owning wedding couple.

Blogger

Scenario: Blog editing with word processor features

Writer can create tables, insert images and spell check. There exists a plugin for Microsoft Word, Blogger for Word which only supports basic functionality for blogging from MSWord, a superior solution for Writer would be nice. oooblogger is a good starting position, support for more blogger backends is required, and support for media uploads to support inserted images needs to be completed. Improving the responsiveness of the "edit existing blogs" and a preview in a brower would also be nice additions.

Browse Online Addons

Scenario: Make it easy to find good quality addons

From the Add-Ons dialog add the ability to browse a pre-defined online location where Add-Ons can be found. www.ooomacros.org exists as a possible starting point. The proposed Add-Ons collection would need to be strictly quality controlled to work on all platforms, and to not require any user installation work except possibly restarting OOo. The brower of Add-Ons should show a summary of the Add-On and the ability to view the documentation URL of each Add-On before determining whether to download and install it.

Wikipedia Smart Tags

Scenario: Find articles in wikipedia from topics in your document.

The idea is that openoffice.org would automatically look up phrases in your document (possibly automatically, or possibly only at a users direction) in wikipedia and see if they have an article written about this content, if so highlight them with a special link which takes you to the wikipedia article about it. e.g. reading a document about Russian History and "Peter the Great" automatically link to background information about Peter on wikipedia. Or firefox style, a sidebar accumulates the links.

AWESOME. me wants this!--Viceroy321 14:07, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

Better Template Dialog

Scenario: Creating a document should start with selecting a picture of the type of document you are going to write

We have a create from template wizard for impress, this is a suitable route for creating a word processor document as well. The existing impress dialog is a bit klunky and doesn't by default contain many examples for openoffice.org. The Apple iWork suite has nice templates and a nice selector widget. So we need a better template dialog like the iWork one, and ideally with the ability to browse an online set of quality controlled templates. documentation.openoffice.org contains a starting position, but some selection of best of breed needs to be done as well as seperation by language and theme, cleanup in terms of setting titles and licences and generation of previews. AppleTemplateDialog.png

Tackle FAQs

Scenario: Known FAQ problems

e.g. we know that users find it difficult to do certain tasks because they have become FAQs. So we should tackle these known FAQs with new approaches, e.g. creating a title page in writer is a common problem. So we should e.g. by default dock the styles browser when using writer to make it more obvious that styles exist, making it more likely that they will be discovered. Another approach for writer is to take the impress approach and create a side panel which shows a preview of all the pages in the document, in this panel right clicking the first page should allow the most common task of applying the title style to the page, selecting the first two pages should enable the auto creation of a first page style and a second page style with all the appropiate follow styles set to create a "first two pages do not have headers/footers and page 1 starts on the third normal style page" Writersidepanel.png

Help Agent Notification

Scenario: Help Agent activation is overly-intrusive

e.g. When the help agent is triggered due to some feature occurring e.g autocorrect getting triggered. The help agent appears in the bottom right of the page, noone ever clicks on it and it stays there annoyingly. Perhaps a better solution would be to use the GNOME notification area and for a fixed period show the text of the tip there instead which explains what has taken place, and disappear it after some short period of time. Uncluttering the main application window.

There have been some discussions on the mail lists:

http://www.openoffice.org/servlets/ReadMsg?listName=discuss&msgNo=57241

http://www.openoffice.org/servlets/ReadMsg?listName=discuss&msgNo=59619

See also the Help Agent Wiki page.

Keynote features

Keynote-style transitions

Scenario: Making OOo Impress presentations even more impressive

I saw a few days ago someone doing a keynote speech using Apple's Keynote presentation software. Is it possible to integrate that amazing animation functionality to Impress? I think it would be an excellent feature to make our presentations even more impressive.

"Next slide preview" in presentations

The possibility to see on the monitor the next slide of the presentation while the actual presentation is running on screen.

I believe this is completed. See OpenOffice.org Presenter Console extension (openoffice.org-presenter-console package.)

New 3D effects

Reflecting of images on the "bottom" to give a 3D impression. (Also seen in compiz-fusion 0.5 cube animation.)


new OpenGL transitions have been proposed to students in Education Project, and this one is a great idea -> will add it

Alpha blending of fonts

Effects to scale and blend fonts as animation effects like in Keynote 3.0 or flash animations.


Flash animation possibilities

Why have presentations and flash animations not joined yet? Morphing is definetly a feature that should be integrated into presentations! User animations should be edited on a timeline and not on base of numbering.


Latex Beamer Class readability of slides

To improve the readability of text on slides the possibility to use DTP-typesetting features would be nice. As an alternative Latex beamer class import/export function could be implemented.

Hover preview (mouse over) & displaying styles on the menu

Scenario: Less clicks, previewing effects before clicking to apply

Office 2003 displays a preview of the style in the menu, and Office 2007 will do hover previews on styles, font size, font, and probably other things. I don't think OOo needs to get much from Office 2007 but these 2 features are neat. I don't have an issue with the toolbar set up right now (mine are custom and extremely slimmed down); I have memorized most every icon and hardly ever use the menus.

All icons on the toolbar should have a hover effect (translucent color, something 3d, etc), it just helps out as far accessibility goes and also can add some cool aesthetics effects.

Paragraph toolbar

Scenario: More toolbar, less dialog box

A toolbar with paragraph options that are displayed in the Paragraph Options dialog box would be extremely useful. Things needed would be indenting and spacing of course, but not just simple button to get general ones such as Single, Double, etc. I'd love to see an input text box to enter things like 12pt or 0.17" for each item (customizable which ones appear of course). I do not think the alignment buttons should be moved from the General toolbar however.

Subversion

Scenario: Centralized storage and enabling teams to work on the same document at the same time.

An extension on the already existing version control of OpenOffice.

This would be rather trivial to implement, by teaching OpenOffice to save documents as uncompressed directory-hierarchies. Then you can have the directory in the revision control system of your choice, using standard checkout, commit, and merge tools to collaborate on the document.

Add to that the ability to trigger some sort of automatic "commit on save" functionality and you have undos across sessions. Me want!

Sqlite support in OpenOffice.org

Offer Sqlite (http://www.sqlite.org/) support. SQLite is a software library that implements a self-contained, serverless, zero-configuration, transactional SQL database engine. SQLite is the most widely deployed SQL database engine in the world. The source code for SQLite is in the public domain. Sqlite is easier to migrate with PHP based web applications than current solutions.

Document Encryption (GPG)

Scenario: encrypting/decripting on the fly document using GPG

An extension or feature that can encrypt and decrypt on-the-fly documents with GPG. Say for example we want to keep secret document FOO between alice and bob, you can double click on a file, and it devcrypts on the fly. When you save the documents, it "automagically" encrypt the file with the keys you decided on the document properties or in the save button. That would have a lot of advantage over disk encryption, so that a document can be shared and can be backed up on a central storage. This plugin/feature can be useful for banks, govs and where sensitive data and usability is key feature.

Pfolk 19:52, 24 May 2007 (CEST)

Write Code in OpenOffice

<PIPEDREAM>
In a full-fledged rip-off of Jack Ganssle from Embedded.com, I want to code inside a full-fledged editor. I want my documentation to be a part of my code. I want to describe a state-machine with a good picture and then code it. I'm sick of creating RTL timing diagrams in ascii pictures, I want real diagrams. I want to draw a diagram of what my system will be like and then turn around and enter "code-mode" and create the system I diagrammed. Inside of "code-mode" I want to highlight the most important part of my algorithm. If a piece of legacy code is really-really fickle, and must be maintained "as-is", I want to be able to highlight the code in red.
</PIPEDREAM>

Additional keyboard shortcuts

Presently Ctrl+[?], Shift+ [?], and Ctrl+Shift+[?] are available as keyboard shortcuts. I would LOVE Alt+[?] to be added as a possibility as well. It can serve as more of a wildcard for custom shortcuts than any of the other which are largely already assigned to functions, if not in OOo, then in Word or other common applications. Oh, and an additional reason to add it... Word lets you do it. I don't, at present, have need/desire for anything additional other than alt being added, nor even know if it would be possible, but I could imagine others might find use for other key combinations (windows+[?], for example). - Wmblewett

Personally, I'd like to see a way that, once I'm in the Format > Character box, it will let me choose Small Caps without taking my hands off the keyboard. -- TimNelson 23:48, 7 March 2008 (CET)

Keyboard short cuts need to be more flexible. Arbitrary creation of two-key shortcuts (e.g. Ctrl+r, a) would be extremely useful, boosting usability and typing speed (when integrating typing with formatting).

Ability to attach short cuts to toolbar buttons would boost efficiency.

Real Indexing

The indexing in OpenOffice Writer has its good points, but it could be so much better. The main feature I'd like to see is the possibility to add entries that say things like "John Citizen: see Citizen, John". But there is so much more that could be done. For comparison, look not to other word processors, but to professional indexing software, such as DEXter or CINDEX feature list.

-- TimNelson 23:48, 7 March 2008 (CET)

Fonts and typographical features

Announcements whether a font effect is included in the font or generated by OpenOffice

There is an announcement whether italics or boldness is included in the fonts or generated by OpenOffice. I would like to see the same concerning the font effects. For example small caps are included in many OpenType fonts, but OpenOffice uses only scaled down small caps? The difference between true and computer generated small caps is tremendous.

Typographical features

The poor font support is one of the main reasons OpenOffice cannot be used to publish professional looking documents. Also typographical features like kerning, tracking, word spacing, auto leading and vertical spacing should be implemented.

Digital Ink in OpenOffice

A feature with which one can scribble handwritten annotations to any OpenOffice document would be fine. Correcting documents would be in a more natural way.

Non-Greedy/Lazy Regular Expressions

It would be nice to be able to switch the find/replace, as well as other places where regexps are used, to be either greedy or not greedy.

Come on, that usually is only a matter of adding [^x] (substitute x for whatever is appropriate) to the regexp. I'd say thats pretty low priority.

But wait, see http://user.services.openoffice.org/en/forum/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=23030&p=105024 for one practical example where this is needed.

Password protect .odb openoffice.org database documents

As other documents (.odf) have this feature, it would be great if it could be implemented for openoffice.org base as well!

Document-wide Spellcheck Dictionary

It would be really useful if there was a way to add words to a dictionary that only applied to the current document. Many times there are words that you only use in one document. For example, lets say you are writing an article about Bjarne Stroustrup. In most documents, you would never use the name Bjarne, and don't want it to show up in your "suggested spellings".

Alter behaviour of "Font Size" combo-box control

I'd prefer the current font size to be not on top of the "pull down" list, but in the middle (if it's not the smallest size available). It's unnatural that all the "bigger" font sizes are easily accessable when clicking the combo-box (because they are below the head of the selection), but for accessing all smaller sizes, one needs to scroll the pull-down-list up.

Of course, the current behaviour is based in the standard combo-box behaviour, but it's just not optimal. The suggestion above might be implemented using a listener on the click-event on the combo-box control, moving the viewport of the inner list element such that the currently selected size is in the vertical middle of the list.

--Schmiddtchen 15:48, 31 August 2008 (CEST)


WYSIWYG Font Viewer

When selecting fonts, its nice to know what the font looks like! Lets see what the fonts look like by making displaying there name with the font they are!Drsassafras 18:43, 1 October 2008 (CEST)

Font Selecting Help

When moving the cursor over the font I would like to change it, I have found it handy in other document editors for the font on the page to change accordingly. This is especially helpful when trying to size where the font will fit, or how it will fit, or what it look like in context to the rest of the doc.Drsassafras 18:43, 1 October 2008 (CEST)

Smarter Font Detection

Right now I browse down the font list and there is - Trebuchet MS... Trebuchet MS Bold... Trebuchet MS Bold Italic....Trebuchet MS Italic.... - I would like to see Open-Office become a little smarter, and detect that this is all one font (even though they are separate font files) When I hit the bold button, Open office should switch to the bold font...... Does this not make sence? So the list would look like this - Trebuchet MS! - And then I can hit the bold button or the italic button if I want it bolded or italicized. For features Open Office might not be able to deal with such as extra bold and ultra light, the fonts could be left in the font list.Drsassafras 18:43, 1 October 2008 (CEST)

Ok. I now see that Open-Office does do this...kinda. Perhaps bringing all the fonts under one name would be nice. But, greying out all the options that are not there. For example if a font can not be bolded, grey out the bold button. This way people can see what there options are. Or a B , I , etc. could be shown beside the font name in the font list. So people know what options are available before hand. In my mind though, just greying out the non-selectable options is enough.
One more thought in this instance. For fonts like regular, demibold, bold, ExtraBold... The Bold button could toggle between them. Maybe the icon could change a bit to let people know that there is different grades of bold underneath the bold button. Instead of one B in the icon, there could be 2 Bs overlapping with different amounts of boldness. Drsassafras 14:49, 10 October 2008 (CEST)

Crossref showing Listitem Number

Legal documents often have "See paragraph <ParNum>" where <ParNum> is some paragraph number, and the paragraphs are numbered sequentialy, e.g.:

1. para_1 2. para_2 3. See paragraph 2.

where the above ordered list is created by turning Numbering On. The problem is if later, an extra item is inserted. Then the number is not automatically updated.

What's needed is allowing composer to provide a unique name , e.g. Para2nd, (where uniqueness is enforced by OOoWriter) for the paragraph to be cross-referenced, and then the composer could say:

3. See paragraph Para2nd.

where Para2nd is actually some sort of field name with a new format, similar to Page or Text for Formula formats, but called something different, say Index. Then, updating the fields would replace Para2nd with the actual listitem number, e.g. 2. This should work just like when the Page format is used, only instead of retrieving the page number, the item number is retrieved and displayed. This could be extended to multi-level lists, where retrieval would be 1.2.3 or whatever, depending on how deeply nested was the targeted listitem.

Fit To Page

A feature I really miss is the "fit to page" feature that I used years ago with word perfect. It will fit your document to a certain number of pages. Very handy. You tell it what it can mess around with margins, line height, font-size, character spacing, etc. Used it all the time. Great results. Rally miss it. Drsassafras 06:10, 5 October 2008 (CEST)

Formatting

Add to Change Case: Sentence case and Title Case.


Document as Email - Choose in what format to send document

When emailing documents, would be nice if ComboBox drops down making it possible to choose Openoffice.org format or Pdf or Microsoft Office.


True Print Preview instead of Page Preview

Page Preview currently only works for the full page. Printing allows you to print selections with no way to preview the output of you are actually going to send to the printer which is frequently less than a full page.

Impress Zoom Feature

In Impress, it is quite usual to use high zoom levels to arrange your items on a slide. (To me,) The easiest way to zoom in and out is is to use the mouse wheel while pressing Ctrl. The behaviour right now is that one tick of the scroll wheel will change the zoom level by 10%. This is a good step for zoom levels around 100%, since the difference between two ticks is also about 10% (e.g. change from 100% to 110%). However, for higher zoom levels, the difference betweent two ticks becomes ever smaller, at a zoom level of 500% one tick will change it to 510%, which corresponds to a relative change of only 2%. As can be seen from this example, zooming in with the mouse wheel becomes the slower, the higher the absolute zoom factor, which is not a desirable effect and makes working with this feature quite slow. My proposal would be to change this behavior in the following way: one tick of the mouse wheel always changes the zoom level by 10% of the value of the current zoom level, i.e. at a zoom level of 100%, one tick still changes the zoom level to 110%, while at a zoom level of 500%, one tick changes the zoom level to 550%. -- Stax 14:16, 2 February 2009 (CET)

Writer Zoom positioning

Currently in openoffice.org writer 3.0 zooming with works this way: after zooming out focus gets lost and zooming in always moves screen to the first page whenever cursor actually was before zooming. So, if user on 5th page performs ctrl+wheeldown just to see page and adjacent pages, does no clicks, then performs ctrl+wheelup to return to editing back, the first page is zoomed. This is inconvinient and makes user scroll down back to 5th page. Probably zooming in should zoom to point where cursor is, not to top left corner of first page

OpenOffice.org Presenter Console scroll wheel

The scroll wheel does not work for the OpenOffice.org Presenter Console. At least it doesn't work for the "slides" view of the presentation.

Continuous/Proportional Formatting

A feature I've always wanted in a spreadsheet program is a continuous form of conditional formatting. I would like to be able to make a cell's formatting a linear combination of two different cell styles, determined by how big the number in the cell is. Numbers in a spreadsheet could be made physically larger if they represent a larger number, or more statistically significant numbers could be highlighted more yellow. This would allow a new form of data visualization in the spreadsheet itself, and could be one of those critical "I can't believe we ever lived without this" features.

Only details follow:

The implementation, as I see it, would be a seperate menu item called "proportional formatting" or "continuous formatting" (If you have another idea for the name put it here please: _____,_____,_____ ). In the subsequent dialog, the user can create multiple proportional formatting entries (ideally an unrestricted amount). To define an entry, the user selects the two cell styles they want to interpolate between, and two numbers (formula boxes to be more general) that define the endpoints of the range.

Let's call those numbers A and B and the cell styles Sa and Sb. For simplicity, let's make a number x, that says how far along from Sa to Sb the current cell's formatting should be (Normally between 0 and 1, where 0=>Sa, 1=>Sb). If the selected cell's contents (the one we're formatting) is C, then x = (how far, from A to B, C is) = (C-A)/(B-A). Then, the cell's formatting would be x*Sb+(1-x)*Sa.

You'd probably need to truncate x between the range 0 and 1 to prevent invalid cell formatting from happening.

Optional: The dialog could have radial buttons to select between linear interpolation, logarithmic, exponential, etc. This would be applied to the value x before the x*Sb+(1-x)*Sa formula, to allow people to emphasize different parts of the range. The feature would be useful without the ability to select these different mappings.


Calc: Table Header Multiple Filter Selecting Capability

A very useful feature to help sort data in calc is to filter based on multiple criteria when a table is setup w/ filterable headers. Currently, I personally get exports from others from MS Excel. When I go to sort the data, I can only select ONE parameter at a time. To help clarify, see: filter.png It would be nice to include multiple selections in the filter. The provided screenshot is a native .xls opened in calc.

Writer: Collapse paragraph and/or sections

Include a right vertical bar with "+/-" to collapse (folde) each section. This feature is also known as "folding editor". It could be an option to be activated in the view menu.

Writer: View/Hide section option on navigator

Include a view/hide option on the section list in the navigator, to be accessed from the pop-up menu. The current view/hide requires to many clicks to acess the corresponding menu, whereas the sections as listed and managed in the navigator anyway.

Writer: Show differences with previous version when saving

Include a feature to show the differences with the currently saved version when saving on the same file. This will be useful when coming back to a document opened for a while, for which you do not remember if you have made any changes or if you just typed some text on it by error.

Writer: text mode ouput

Include a feature (in a separate binary) to show the text on a terminal, similar to Antiword for showing the text of documents instantaneously, without having to open windows. It is useful when your are looking for a document on a remote server in SSH, for scripting (indexing features)...

Writer: start parameter compare docs

Include a feature to have a start parameter for comparing to files. This can be useful, if you want to use other software like eclipse and you want to compare two versions of a document.

Writer: Richer Mail Merge

The current MailMerge functionality only allows generating an address block. This doesn't allow for richer customizations inside the body of text. A fully featured Mail Merge should accept as input a CSV (or some other form of ordered data). Then, in the document, you should be able to insert a column name through the MailMerge interface. Then, when you do the merge, the data from that column will be substituted into that place in the document. Ideally, it would also included logical statements (ie, if a certain column is blank, add a comma here).

Writer: Vim Mode

Add support for modal editing in the style of Vim.

Writer: Hide space between pages

Currently, in Writer, there is no way to disable showing the space between pages (or, if there is, it isn't under "view" or anywhere else that I could find). This means that a document that includes many page breaks but not much content is hard to display compactly on one page.

Writer: Show Page Break nonprinting character

It is possible to display most nonprinting characters (paragraph end, space, tab, etc), but it is not possible to display the page-break character. This means that, for instance, it is impossible to tell where page breaks are in web view.

Writer: Add Reading View

High school and college policy debaters who read evidence on their laptops require a reading view. This view would allow navigating pages using the arrow keys (down or right would go one page forward; left or up would go one page back). Home would go to page 1; end would go to the last page; page up and down would work the same as the arrow keys; pressing enter or spacebar would also move one page down; using a mouse with a scroll wheel could also turn the page up or down; escape would exit reading mode. Ideal addition features include: -the ability to edit the document while in the reading mode by clicking on the text and then typing. Pressing escape once would go back to reading mode. -the ability to display two pages side by side -the ability to display the document map ("navigator") while in reading mode or to disable it -the ability to make the reading mode occupy the full Open Office window ie, hide the chrome at the top)

Writer: Hide individual sub-headings in Navigator

High school and college policy debaters heavily use the navigator to jump around large documents that are organized with headings. When one of those documents includes many levels of headings and subheadings, it is hard to use in Open Office because it is impossible to collapse a particular node. Now, if you right click on the headings part of Navigator, you can choose the outline level, which will collapse everything down to that level, but that isn't very useful because it works globally. If I have 10 headings at outline level 1 and each of those have 10 headings at outline level 2, I probably want to only display level 1 on 9 out of the 10 level 1 headings, but I will want to display level 2 headings that are the children of one of the level 1 headings. To achieve this, put a little +/- icon to the left of each heading so that you can expand or collapse that one heading. It would work similar to how "Headings" has a +/- icon to the left of it so that you can choose to look at the Headings part of Navigator.

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