[Libreoffice-ux-advise] [Bug 125268] Wrong text highlight color when export document to doc/docx

[bugzilla-daemon at bugs.documentfoundation.org]

https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=125268

--- Comment #38 from Michael Meeks <michael.meeks at collabora.com> ---
> Better we would fix a different issue, which is unclear set of what is broken
> on export. The warning user gets when saving to an external format doesn't
> list specifics what will break;

This is an old-chestnut. There is a very significant cost in code complexity,
maintenance and CPU time of walking the entire LibreOffice document model
before starting to serialize it. Worse - whatever output we produce is never
going to be completely accurate anyway.

Worse - this will inevitably produce a long, and impenetrable series of highly
technical 'stuff' as text (if we had even more infinite resource we could link
each item to the document somehow) - that is going to be frightening and/or not
interesting to all of our end-users who just want to understand:
"why does it not work?",
"Why did you let me get into this situation I don't understand !?" - etc.

Any good UX should not be spending lots of time, developer work, debugging etc.
to do an imperfect job of providing extremely dense and unhelpful information.
No matter how satisfying that is to developers who can say "I told you so in a
footnote on page 135 of that dialog you clicked through" ;-)

Microsoft of course were leaned on by their customers to try to do this for
their ODF export filter. They produced 900+ pages of documentation - you can
read it here: 
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/office_standards/ms-oodf/68b99f79-842f-4db2-9249-0f71b611712b
in a 10Mb PDF download.

I'm not in the UX team; but I would be staggered if this was thought to be a
good idea. Almost certainly it is far easier to solve the problem in a more
elegant way.

As an example: if you load a DOCX file - then we can safely assume you will
save as DOCX (this covers some vast proportion of the use cases) - and so we
can hide the UI options associated with doing more powerful ODF supported
things =) On ODF export to DOCX people expect some format shifting problems, so
we select the nearest feature, and the nearest matching hue for this case.

At least, that's my 2 cents.

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