Writer/ToDo/Layout

Intro

Terminology

Layout:

• refers to the orientation and positioning of the textual and non-textual content on an output device
• identical to the user's-referred View!
  • What the users refer to "View" in Writer is correctly designated by developers as the Layout.

Available Layouts

The following layouts are currently implemented in Writer:

• Print Layout
• Online Layout and
• Print Preview Layout

The latter isn't editable and is therefore left out of this discussion. The Print Layout implements WYSIWYG and tries to come as close as possible to the printed document. However, this layout is not optimized for every use case. Different layouts might be better in such circumstances.

Motivation

Document Creation Path

Various specific Layouts are better suited for particular tasks. In common practice, creating a new document involves the following steps:

• plan the document / write a first draft
• extend draft, style formatting
• verify content and make corrections
  • more advanced style formatting
• advanced formatting
  • document structure
• verify targeted output:
  • e.g. Print Layout
  • or some other specific Layout (e.g. for web publishing) depending on the targeted output

Every step involves some specific actions. There are indeed specific demands for the various steps. Layouts should therefore target individually and specifically these steps. They should ease the work for a single step, while obviously, they will be less suited for the remaining steps.

"Online" Layout

• documents that are specifically written for presentation and not for printing
• disadvantage: suboptimal for editing (long lines)
• acts as a final preview

Some new layouts are requested with the following motivations:

"Outline" Layout

• brainstorming the structure of a document to create initial hierarchy
• easy tool for developing and changing document structure
• prioritize, arrange and rearrange ideas hierarchical; add details later
• focus on content, no layout should distract from content
• chose level of details visible in any part of the document

"Draft" Layout

(comparable to Word's "Normal View"):

• avoid eating up space by margins and page breaks; “text editor” editing style
• focus on content, no layout should distract from content
• page breaks should still be visible, but in a less disturbing way
• sophisticated formatting is not seen as part of document (content) creation
• page and column layout are artificial and have no content related meaning
• columns are good for reading on paper, but a pain for reading on screen
• headers and footers don't need to be visible while editing and proof reading
• easy and fast text scrolling for better proof reading
• no horizontal scrolling necessary even with big fonts on small screens or windows

Publishing Layout

The last step in professional publishing involves advanced layout formatting. This layout should ease working with the document as a whole, as well as with more complex structures like whole paragraphs, sections, columns, frames, and other advanced writer objects. It is NOT intended as an editing mode, BUT rather as a purely layout-formatting mode.

• advanced formatting should be visible
• paragraphs and various objects should be highlighted as a whole
• various complex operations:
  • compress line
  • compress paragraph to x-lines / by x-lines / fit on page
  • compress by x-pages
  • keep various words / lines / titles / objects together
  • complex multi-column operations

!!! TO BE EXTENDED !!!

Discussion

There are some common motivations but also some differences. It seems that they also have some technical similarities. This is discussed here.

There is a particular problem in Writer that needs to be solved before it makes sense to implement more views. A Writer documents always has one layout. If the user switches from "Print Layout" to "Online Layout" the old layout is thrown away and the new layout for the complete document is calculated. On switching back the same happens again. This can become quite annoying when new layouts are used that let switching between layouts happen more often. Perhaps it might also be attractive to have two different layouts visible at a time in two different windows, e.g. Outline Layout and Print Layout.

The Draft Layout also needs information about the position of the page breaks in the document. So at least this has to be saved from the Print Layout but from the above it seems to be a better idea to preserve the Print Layout completely and retrieve the page breaks from it.

So we should investigate first if we can change the code in a way that it can handle more than one Layout at a time. This will make the implementation of new layouts better and their usage more attractive.