Feature request: reveal codes

wvholst · Blue Pill Joined: Nov 25, 2007 Posts: 2

Since the OpenOffice.org appears unwilling to understand the usefulness of such a feature (see issue #3395, which has been in the top hundred of feature requests for years), I'll ask here. Anyone using a wordprocessor for complex documents (technical documents, books, or in my own case, contracts) who has to work with other people with varying levels of wordprocessing skills in different organisation has encountered documents that contained several overlapping styles, botched up lay-outs etc. Those of us who remember WordPerfect also remember that that wordprocessor allowed the user to dive under the hood of a document throug the 'reveal codes' feature and fix a document instead of having to redo the lay-out completely from scratch. The fact that more 'modern' wordprocessors such as MS Word and OpenOffice.org do not have that feature has cost me countless hours of productivity.

pluby · The Architect Joined: Jun 16, 2003 Posts: 11949

I agree that WordPerfect's reveal codes is a really nifty feature. However, I don't think voting for it is going to make much difference as to whether or not it is included in NeoOffice or OpenOffice.org. Why? Basically because WordPerfect was designed from the start to support this feature. In contrast, OpenOfice.org never contemplated such a feature. Based on my limited experience with the Writer code, I suspect that implementing this feature would be a very large project that would require changes in much of the existing Writer code.

We currently have donation levels that support no more than 1 or 2 staff people so I honestly doubt we will ever be able to tackle a project of this magnitude. Even if we could afford to implement it, I doubt it would look as clean as WordPerfect and, instead, would look like the contents of the content.xml file embedded in any .odt documents. For those of you that have looked at this file, the style and formatting tags can be literally 90% of the content in this file for a very short document. In other words, WordPerfect has a nice simple formatting structure for its documents whereas OpenOffice.org has a very flexible but extremely verbose formatting structure.

Given that you lose thousands of hours of productivity, I would think that a very reasonable alternative would be to buy WordPerfect for Windows and use Parallels to run it on your Mac. The cost of WordPerfect plus Parallels is not cheap, but if the reveal codes feature is really a productivity enhancer, it might be worth the cost especially if the rumors that WordPerfect's latest beta release supports ODF and OpenXML.

Patrick

wvholst · Blue Pill Joined: Nov 25, 2007 Posts: 2

... however, the cost of WordPerfect is not an issue. The fact that MS Word is the de facto standard for wordprocessing these days, at least in Europe. I have to exchange documents with MS Word users outside my own organisation on a daily basis, so switching to anything else but OpenOffice.org is not an option. Even a simplified version of Reveal Codes would ease the pain a lot. One that shows any references to stylesheets and the codes for any manual changes to the layout. And I can see the limitations the NeoOffice crew have. At least you are willing to acknowledge that it is a useful feature, contrary to teh OpenOffice.org guys.

valterb · Posted: Tue Nov 27, 2007 6:33 am Post subject:

I use to work with WordPerfect during my old MSDOS days, and this feature is quite amazing.
Someone at openoffice.org has started a reveal code project but at the moment is abandoned. Visit http://wp.openoffice.org/rcodes.html

There was an attempt to write a macro that works to reveal codes, but last time it was updated was 2004. It's still downdonable, and you can try it visiting page http://homepages.paradise.net.nz/hillview/OOo/

Valter

yoxi · Posted: Tue Nov 27, 2007 1:59 pm Post subject:

I used the Reveal Codes macro for a while, and it's pretty opaque - and that's not its fault. The problem with OpenOffice doc format compared to WordPerfect is that all the codes are applied on a paragraph by paragraph basis (at the very least) so there's an enormous quantity of codes to view in any body of text. WordPerfect's paradigm was that a code applied until its EndOfCode flag appeared, which made for a much sparser code field to wade through.

- padmavyuha