[plug] JD stresses at OOo (was: AbiWord)

[James Devenish]

Hi,

In message <20040220054535.GB29476 at erdos.home>
on Fri, Feb 20, 2004 at 01:45:35PM +0800, Cameron Patrick wrote:
> James Devenish wrote:
> |  - The 'Open' dialogue takes me somewhere other than the current working
> |    directory or my home directory (this might be acceptable, but it's
> |    not like any other apps I use).
> It takes me to the last directory I opened something in.  That sounds
> sensible.  It wouldn't surprise me if the very first time I used it, it
> had a lousy default though.

This is never what I want at startup. I haven't found a configuration
option for it, and cannot pass a directory name to the soffice command
either. Haven't looked for help online because I stopped using OOo in
light of there being too many things I felt I needed to resolve.

> | Also, it doesn't let me navigate to
> | directories via text entry. This is normal for some operating
> | systems, but a pretty obvious omission under Linux.
> Have you tried typing in a directory name in the text field?
> It works for me.

Yeah, I tried that before posting. And I can sound see where I went
wrong. Okay, the deal is that I can't do tab completion or globbing, but
I /can/ use the <enter> key with entry prediction. (By the way, I have
trouble using OOo at the same time as writing e-mail because my window
manager seems to get confused by OOo windows in a manner that is hard to
describe. Perhaps not an OOo problem per se, though it only manifests
with OOo.)

> |  - the word-processor toolabar Font menu would be laughable if it
> |    weren't so sad -- it only shows six fonts at a time.
> It shows me all the fonts installed on my system - rather more than six,
> in my case.

Doesn't work like that for me. Maybe I broke the installation (wouldn't
surprise me). I found the installation non-intuitive because I was
supposed to run a 'Setup' programme after unpacking. I ended up deleting
OpenOffice and then going to its website and following the installation
instructions from there. I suppose I should have done that in the first
place, and there is no particular problem running a Setup programme, but
I have not grown to expect it to be necessary to do so.

> Try Format->Page.  IMHO this is a saner place for it than the file menu
> anyway.  "Printer settings" is for low-level stuff.

Format->Page looks good.