WordPerfect-like "Show Codes"

[jake]

WordPerfect has one feature which keeps me hanging onto it -- the ability to show the formatting codes. Any way we can get this into neooffice? or is it aready there and I just missed it?

jake.albert@gmail.com

[yoxi]

WordPerfect's docs work on a very different principle to just about any others. They easily support the Reveal Codes approach because the formatting codes are really right in there with the text. There is nothing like this in OpenOffice or NeoOffice/J (or MS Office). However...

Check out this oooforums.org discussion for an opensource OO macro by Ian Laurenson that "does the same thing", albeit buggy and pretty slow unless you have a fast mac - this macro is a work of love, a monument to people trying to make a feature they love come to life in a context where it doesn't exist yet. Have fun playing with it, and enjoy reading the forum thread (you should do this first to get a realistic sense of what the macro does - and does not - do).

- yoxi

[jake]

wow, thanks for that yoxi, will give it a shot.

[sardisson]

The wp project also has a mailing list for Reveal Codes and work necessary to add that feature to OOo, though I don't know how active it is. But if you want the feature, the macro is your answer today

Oddly enough, I've always thought that structured documents (like XML used in OOo and Neo/J docs) would lend themselves easily to Reveal Codes, as the document is not some convoluted binary but rather a structure of various tags indicating formatting and other style information. Apparently not

Smokey

[yoxi]

well, Ian's done a pretty good job with the macro, and it's only possible at all because the XML format does sit the codes with the content, as you say - but I think what makes it difficult is the formatting codes themselves are complicated in their structure. Here's a simple example of a line with one word bolded:



So you can imagine how complicated it could get once styles, tables, equations, and gods know what else are in the mix. Still, this macro gives quite useful insight into what's going on behind the curtain in a paragraph - as Ian notes, Writer codes are paragraph-based (which means that codes get repeated every paragraph), rather than document-based as wp is (which means a code appears just once in the doc to turn on, and once to turn off again).

- yoxi

[OPENSTEP]

I don't know if that feature list is still active, but that really has been one of the more vocally requested features I've seen over the last few years for OOo writers. I suspect now that more lawyers may need to move over in Mass. at least it might crop up a bit more...I've heard that lawyers love their WordPerfect

ed

[jakeOSX]

yes, they do. for some reason the law proffession was the hardest for word to break into. (and even still they are mostly WP).

and this is definatly one of the best features of WP over everyone else. And I have a great discontent for Word "show codes" crap.

[sardisson]

After the announcement that libwpd and WriterPerfect had been integrated in OOo 1.9.xx (I forget which milestone), the main dev@wp list got several posts from lawyers about converting their WP docs...Fridrich ended up with a half-dozen or so new classes of bugs to fix (well, if the people actually filed bugs with sample documents like we asked them to...).

Reveal Codes was a god-send for fixing poorly nested formatting. I didn't use it much with WP documents (it seems the newer versions got better at preventing strange and broken nesting), but I used it constantly to figure out what the #@$#@#$# was going on in people's Word documents. I don't know how a program could fubar documents like that all the time and become the dominant word processor in the world (oh, wait, illegal use of monopoly)....

Sometimes I would use Reveal Codes with WP documents so I could remember how I had done some fancy formatting....

Smokey