[Libreoffice-ux-advise] [Bug 155740] Support distinction rather than override of conflicting subdocument styles

[bugzilla-daemon at bugs.documentfoundation.org]

https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=155740

--- Comment #15 from Mike Kaganski <mikekaganski at hotmail.com> ---
(In reply to Eyal Rozenberg from comment #14)
> Mike, I think you might may be making an implicit assumption that the author
> of the master document has written the subdocuments with the prior intent to
> place them in a master document.

Exactly; I even stated that explicitly:

(from comment #12)
> 1. Master documents is an advanced feature, not *designed* as something to
> be used without a bit of learning. A proposal designed to enable use like "I
> suddenly decided to use this feature with a set of documents not designed
> with master documents in mind" is not a proper scenario here.

I strongly believe that what you explain below is not a proper use of master
documents feature:

> I'm thinking in this issue more about the
> user who wants to integrate an independently-authored document, which would
> have stood on its own, into the master document. 
> 
> Here's another use case, exemplifying this perhaps more strongly: I'm
> working on some legal brief, or report, to which I want to attach documents
> somebody else has written (and luckily for me, they are available as (maybe
> read-only) ODT's or DOCX's). Each of those documents has its styles defined
> via Text Body, Normal, Heading 1,2,3 etc. and so on. And - they might be
> different. When I use these as subdocuments - I want all of their styles
> _preserved_.

Any LibreOffice *document* is a *source*, i.e. an artifact allowing to *author*
the content. The *authoring* is the primary goal of existence of all the office
document formats, the reason why we don't use raster bitmaps for our documents.
(I exaggerate, just to emphasize my point.)

Indeed, people might want to store these artifacts, instead of dumping in the
end after creation of a hard copy. But this is still to be able to reuse,
change, or inspect the structure - if not these reasons, PDF would be a better
choice for storing after the document is finished.

But specifically for the "legal brief", the insertion of *other document
sources* into your document is *incorrect*: these documents' structures do
*not* contribute your document's structure; you are not expected to edit them,
but these other documents are just replicas of some state of those documents in
some specified moment in time.

And while I want to stress, that your own "legal brief" example is, IMO,
*strong* case where master documents should *not* be used (and, e.g.,
scans/PDFs of those documents should be inserted), I also say that it would
hold for *any* case when you collect multiple documents into one, when the
sources were *not* created with master document / consistent style in mind, and
you want to keep the heterogenous styling of sources in the end result.

I can see a Paste Special (*not* master document!), which would convert source
style names to unique names on paste, or convert everything to DF.

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