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List:       koffice
Subject:    Some suggestions of features coming out from Lotus Word Pro
From:       Richard Van Den Boom <richard.vdboom () gmail ! com>
Date:       2007-09-19 20:29:25
Message-ID: 200709192229.25900.richard.vdboom () gmail ! com
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Hi,

first, thanks a lot for the wonderful work done on Koffice, I've been using it 
quite often for years now and am really impressed by how far it has come.

Following a bit of a stupid post I made on the Dot, Thomas Zander suggested me 
to post it on the Koffice mailing list, so here we go.

Lotus Word Pro is definitely the most confortable, powerful, well designed 
word processor that I've used for the last ten years. It had (I use the 
passed time because it seems to have been killed with Smartsuite by IBM) many 
features I've never seen in any word processor and which I found using it 
extremely useful.
Since Koffice is having a large overal right now, I though maybe it could be a 
good idea to point out these features, if some of them could perchance be 
implemented easily :

***
1/ Usage of styles :
Word Pro used styles for everything : paragraphs, characters, frames, tables 
like many now, but also headers, footers, page layout. You could create a 
style for every single object you can put in a document. And of course, you 
could import and export styles. That made creating page layout almost as 
powerful as a PAO software.

2/ A single, contextual, attribute box :
There was only one box displaying styles and attributes. The display was 
context sensitive, meaning the displayed styles and attributes were dependent 
on the selected object. Any change in the attribute box was reflected on the 
selected object dynamically. This made formatting much quicker than having a 
pop-up box, select your options then validate/apply. And it reduced quite a 
lot the crowing of the interface. This is a bit what Scribus has now, but the 
box was small, with many tabs, instead of these rows of options that I don't 
find very practical in Scribus. There was a drop-down menu also allowing to 
select what type of attributes you wanted to view, in case the selected 
object allowed for various settings.

3/ Organize your docs in tabs
You could organize your documents in several divisions, each one appearing as 
a tab. Each division could have a completely specific style of page layout, 
numbering, styles. It was completely as a separate document, to the point 
that you could import an external file as a division. The interest is that 
page numbering, table of contents and indexes could be generated on the whole 
document. You could reorganize tabs ( like chapters) by simply drag and 
dropping, and page numbering was automatically reflected (though I think that 
ToC and Index needed to be updated). This was really great to deal with large 
documents with many chapters.
Note that this generalize basically the notion of Sheets in Spreadsheets.

4/ Quick format
There was an option that came a lot later to Word, which is quick formatting. 
Basically, it allow you select part of the text, click on the icon, and then 
every part of text that you select will be formatted the same way, until you 
click again on quick formatting. Word Pro offered an added goodie, in the 
sense that is allowed either to apply the actual formatting of the initially 
selected text, or the style. The later made changes so much quicker.

5/ Research / replace styles
It was possible to look for occurence of a style and replace it with another. 
Believe me, it was wonderful.

***

Well, that's all that comes to my mind, right now. I would need to work with 
it again to remember other useful features. But the ones above are obviously 
those I miss the most.
Please let me know if you want some screenshots or more explanations.

Again, thank you all for all your work.
Best regards,

	Richard Van Den Boom
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