Why do I have to see the grey background in Writer?

[monkeysan]

I seem completely incapable of getting the Writer to view my document ONLY. I don't want to see an image of each page floating on a grey background.

Where does the lameness lie? With my newb NO skills or with NO itself?

If it's NO, I can't imagine that there aren't other writers who can't stand looking at that view. I just want document view...no layout, no gray field, just the plain white that displays my writing surface. ;P

Using NO 2AB3.10 btw.

[Lorinda]

I can get most of the grey background to disappear by going to the View menu and choosing "Web layout." (Don't bother with "Print Layout," as that only works in html documents.) Selecting web layout view gets rid of the grey background on the left and right. There's still a small strip of grey between pages in that view.

It's not terribly intuitive, but the blame for that lies with OpenOffice.org. The NeoOffice project is limited by resources to keeping a native version of OpenOffice.org running on Mac OS X and improving OpenOffice.org features is outside that scope. You can submit feature requests in the OpenOffice.org issue tracker to get it on the radar of the core OpenOffice.org developers: http://qa.openoffice.org/issue_handling/pre_submission.html

[monkeysan]

Thanks for your reply. That does indeed do it. The problem is that I lose all my margins. Reformatting the page doesn't seem to help, as it doesn't appear to affect 'web layout'.

I'm starting to imagine that I won't be using the Writer, so much. It still is an amazing piece of work, I can tell. Since I earn my money writing, I need a tool that can present an interface that's conducive to focusing on the actual writing, not on the background or all the sweet doodads devs often add. Pages works, so I guess I'll stick with that. It just seems a shame for me to use it solely to open MS docs sent in attachments.

Thanks again,

monkeysan

[Lorinda]

My apologies for not checking on the margin issue more closely. It probably doesn't help you any, but if you have columns in your document, the margins seem to stay put, at least they do in the landscaped two column document I checked them on. (That's the most frequent format I use; I did pull up an portrait one column document, but I didn't pay enough attention to the margins!)

I had meant to add that I wasn't sure what side effects would come along with Web View, but I forgot.

[yoxi]

If you can't stand the grey (I know I can't) you can change it to another colour: go to Tools-Options-Appearance and then set the Application Background to a colour that suits you more.

- padmavyuha

[monkeysan]

so i just changed it to white.

i still don't *love* it, but it helps a lot. enough to put NO back into my dock bar. =]

i'd still love to see a document only view, but i understand why new features are not a priority.

[monkeysan]

Ok. Sorry for the double post.

However, I found something quite close to doc view...after taking the suggestion to make application background white, I added one more tweak...I set my window zoom to 'optimal'. Between the two, I have something very close to doc view.

I'm actually quite excited to use NO for some writing projects now.

Thanks

[yoxi]

I'm glad you have it closer to how you need it to be now... by the way, when you wrote "i understand why new features are not a priority" it's not so much that they're not a priority as that they're not an option from NeoOffice's point of view - I hope you understand that for NeoOffice, new features like that are dependent on OpenOffice introducing them into their software on which NeoOffice is based, so suggestions for such new features to the app should be made directly to the openoffice folks, as the NeoOffice developers can only work with/around the openoffice app itself, not make major changes to it.

- padmavyuha