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List:       koffice-devel
Subject:    Re: Explanation on WP vs DTP modes in KWord (Re: Kde-cvs-digest request for information)
From:       Nicolas Goutte <nicog () snafu ! de>
Date:       2002-11-29 23:23:43
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On Friday 29 November 2002 21:15, Thomas Diehl wrote:
> Am Freitag, 29. November 2002 19:59 schrieb David Faure:
> > WP is the word processing mode, the one in which Word closely resembles
> > MSWord or OpenOffice's OOWriter. There's a main frameset, which is
> > responsible for the number of pages that the document has - it will
> > simply show as many pages as necessary for the text it wants to show.
> >
> > DTP is a more frame-based mode. Think of a magazine, where many frames
> > contain different articles. There's no more "main frameset". In this
> > mode, one can now append or remove pages more easily.
>
> Just my two cents as a user and a professional DTPer: I find very little
> advantage in this approach but a lot of possible confusion.
>
> 1) Small terminological problem (thankfully not in the documentation,
> AFAIK):To me, it makes no sense to call the page layout mode "DTP", simply
> because there is a LOTS of "textoriented DTP" which would be done in your
> "WP" mode as soon as KWord can be used for pre-press work. Just think of
> professional book publishing.

Sure, you can do some types of DTP in a word processor but not all. As soon as 
you really have to split your page into boxes like a real magazine, a word 
processor does not bring you far.

For example, in its DTP mode, KWord can do a frame that is a follows up of 
another frame. I have never seen that in any WP and even CSS with its 
broad-minded box model cannot do it either.

>
> 2) I also still find it questionable to have separate modes for
> "textoriented documents" and "page layout". Even if you have most of your
> text in frames it may be practical to have underlying pages where you can
> see common structural elements of the whole thing like page and column
> borders, repeated guidelines and so on. This is particularly important, if
> you are working with a mixed approach and have a main text which you would
> like to have in a base page and a lot of additional stuff in text boxes,
> call-outs and so on.

But you can still have text boxes in the WP modus. Border styles too.

As for columns, they only exists in the WP mode, in the DTP mode they are 
normal frames, as far as I know.

>
> On the whole I wonder if it wouldn't be much more practical to give up on
> these extra modes and just let users rearrange pages in the document
> structure window or the like.

WP know what a header, a footer and columns are. DTP only knows frames (which 
you as viewer can interpret as header, footer, columns...)

Merging the two modes could be an interesting goal. However I have no idea how 
easy it could be done. It is not that we have unlimited manpower in KWord...

>
> Regards,

Have a nice day/evening/night!

>
> Thomas

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