[Libreoffice] [Libreoffice-ux-advise] Fwd: [PATCH] Bug 39167

[Gerald Leppert]

Hi all,

I am using this opportunity to introduce myself. My name is Gerald and I 
am working at the University of Cologne in Germany in social sciences 
and economics. I have been intensively using LibreOffice (since 1995 in 
its first incarnation as StarOffice) and I closely followed its 
development since that time. After OpenOffice.org had been founded I 
started contributing from the perspective of an end user or something 
you might call a heavy user. Last year, I was very pleased that the 
product even turned "libre" around an active developers and users 
community. So far, I contributed to the wiki (user name "Gerald"), filed 
and interacted on some dozen of bugs in the LO bugzilla, contributed the 
thesis templates in the OO templates repository, contributed to the 
German spell check dictionary and filed some enhancement requests in the 
LO bugzilla.

Coming to the point of enhancement requests: After LibreOffice's 
inception, I started contributing to the fast growing EasyHacks wiki 
page. Quite soon it was mentioned that it would be better and that it is 
planned to move all easy hacks to the bugzilla. Hence, I subsequently 
transferred the easy hacks, which I had entered, from the wiki to 
bugzilla. After that, I added some obvious easy hacks directly to bugzilla.

Generally, my experience with enhancement requests in the LO bugzilla 
(mine or requests from others) has been that there is currently very 
little to no feed back, review, discussion or comments made to 
enhancement requests. IMHO this situation is a bit sad and I hope that 
this will be changing in the future.

Improvements to hybrid PDF: As mentioned in the bug 39168, the hybrid 
PDF feature is one of the killer features in LibreOffice. However, its 
implementation has some practical and usability problems out of those 
most had been already raised in the OpenOffice.org bugzilla. However, 
most of them can be easily improved in terms of usability and handling. 
This was my intention of the three enhancement requests made to hybrid 
PDFs (bug 39167, bug 39168, bug 39169) and I was glad that Gabor liked 
the idea and took the initiative to start working on two of these easy 
hacks.

Defending bug 39168: As described in the bug entry, the current file 
ending "pdf" is suboptimal and hybrid PDFs need to be made more visible 
to the user. In the current situation, the hybrid PDF feature is much 
less useful than it could be and in many cases it is even 
counterproductive (i.e. users who try to open 'real' PDF files in 
LibreOffice assuming that they are hybrid PDFs.) There is indeed no hint 
to the user what file actually is hybrid pdf. By the way, the file 
ending ".pap.pdf" is exactly how it is handled in Papyrus 
(www.papyrus.de) where the idea of hybrid PDFs was first implemented. 
Marking bug 39168 as 'invalid' without adding any criticism or comment 
to the bug entry itself is - in my opinion - inappropriate.

Best greetings,
Gerald


Am 05.08.2011 15:28, schrieb Kohei Yoshida:
> On Fri, 2011-08-05 at 14:48 +0200, Andras Timar wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> 2011/8/4 Astron<heinzlesspam at googlemail.com>:
>>> I am also not too keen on the ".pdf" file extension being changed to
>>> ".odf.pdf"—there will be enough users who still have the "hide known
>>> file extensions" option of Windows on and thus will only see ".odf".
>>> Additionally, two file extensions look awful.
>>>
>> The general problem is that everyone can open a bug in bugzilla and
>> mark it as easy hack, then someone comes and fix it, and it turns out
>> in the review phase that the original idea is not so bright. See
>> https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=39168
>> Do you think that fdo#39168 is invalid? Then we should close it as invalid.
> Yeah, I don't like the fact that someone who is not a known contributor
> comes along and file an EasyHack even without a discussion on the
> developer list.  We don't even know the name of gleppert at gmx.de the
> reporter of this EasyHack and several others that I've seen.
>
> To gleppert at gmx.de, could you introduce yourself on our developer list,
> and tell us some brief discussion on the EasyHacks that you've filed in
> the past?  Thanks!
>
> Kohei
>