I know that the office programs theoretically support this, but I found the flow so terrible to be impractical - no wonder casual users don't use it (all the way to many programmers hating WYSIWYG because they hate the process of manual styling so much).
The Microsoft Word way has always seemed to support styles more like they were grafted on as an afterthought, without wanting to disturb the least-knowledgeable users, to the point that knowledgeable users have to tiptoe around all the UI that breaks styles.
I'm glad I'm not the only one that feels this way.
I used to use GREP (regex) styles in InDesign to format heavily structured elements in docs down to specific words without ever touching the style bar.
I also used Framemaker for years, and the DITA open toolkit as well. I get why programmers like FM, but XML/XSLT or rigidly structured tools are not the only path or tool for this.
> The Microsoft Word way has always seemed to support styles more like they were grafted on as an afterthought, without wanting to disturb the least-knowledgeable users, to the point that knowledgeable users have to tiptoe around all the UI that breaks styles.
Lack of tooling for hierarchical structure manipulation is the mark of aiming for the lowest common denominator - casuals who edit short documents one-off.
Microsoft Word Outline Mode is life. My pet feature request: outline mode - with a ticket opened to Libreoffice since 2011, preceded by an Openoffice feature request from 2002. Probably won't ever happen.
yeah..
Open source .... but who would actually use it without the 'pro features'?
Perhaps hou just mean, how do they expect traction if the open components dont entice marginal users
To be free we need usable data, so for instance instead of strange zipped file formats a spreadsheet (witch should not exists, but that's another story) should save data as *sv/SQLite DB by default, a visual doc should be LaTeX or something similar and so on. The suite should be only a viewer.
I with you on sqlite but lost me on LaTeX.
Maybe, many open formats, with many open tools?
And I'm over wishing, hoping for better print support on HTML - I think is the holy Grail.
First crap is the WYSIWYG model, it produce not so nice results and demand very complex UIs. To produce high quality documents LaTeX so far is the best tool, PostScript itself is not known essentially anymore, {La,}TeX is often wrapper for instance in R RMD/Quarto docs to produce nice printouts, it's the de facto standard of scientific typeset and have so far no better competitors, so it's a wise choice.
Second crap is the spreadsheet concept, yes sometimes we need tables, and compute something on them. Org-mode show a simple example of table computing without being a spreadsheet, R is another, most modern NotebookUIs from Mathematica to Jupyter do the same as well. Spreadsheets was an idea to offer limited data manipulation to computer illiterate, and failed. The long tail of disasters suggest it's time to abandon such model. So we need something to store data. sv works well for non-giant dataset, they are simple than some ML dialects, for more SQLite is a popular powerful tool offering a self-contained easy to move storage. I do not like it, but for various things is good, for the rest it's deadly simple to export the DB in some other formats.
We should re-create the Smalltalk desktop model, the end-user programming concept that happen anyway today but hyper limited and in user-unfriendly ways. Take a look at Pharo, than image not just the bare bone environment but something developed like Emacs today. You imaging this: http://augmentingcognition.com/assets/Kay1977.pdf or http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/xsis/XSIS_Smalltalk_Produ... for the modern world.
Back than it fails because of high costs and general ignorance, people simply do not understand the power of this model so feel no need of it. Such legacy burden plague much the present IT as well, with people still imaging files as sheets and folders as suspended folders full of paper sheets in a drawer. Mentally most people have issue going past the paper tool even today. But today we have hw costs small enough and computers themselves spread enough to push again such model.
This model is the nightmare of all big of IT, from old IBM to modern GAFAM, because they know they can't compete with a FLOSS networked desktops model. That's why they do what they can to keep people on the old mainframe model, now the cloud, and many ignoring this keep mimicking the big e powerful not understanding that they try to replicate an archaic model born out of some Xerox spoils once they see how to change them in anti-users ways.
The "FLOSS alternative to" is the networked, end-user programmable desktop model, not some sightly different clone of some GAFAM platform.
- Encrypted syncing between machines
- I want to write using Sublime Text or LibreOffice Writer, I don't want to load up a browser as I often need to focus
- Collaboration features
The first one is made possible by setting up Syncthing on my machines. The next two are already provided by LibreOffice. The missing piece is if I want to share the document with someone. Well this is covered by email OR I have been building a small service to sit infront of my remote syncthing to allow me to set specific documents/directories as viewable. This is basically an Nginx proxy with some fancy configs.
If Cryptpad was more interoperable with retrieving documents I would use it more as a remote interface. However it's too concerned with it's own idea to ever grow in that direction. I really like the Forms you can build with it however. I often use that feature for creating invites to parties I'm hosting. In the future though my sharing program may have a form build feature and Cryptpad will be non-useful to me.
In any case YMMV.
I didn't know anyone ever closed their browser anymore. Honestly trying to imagine a workflow that doesn't include regularly using a browser seems very alien at this point.
Is there a reason for "HD" printing vs "regular"?
Sorry, my spreadsheet usage is limited to numbers and letters so "HD" printing sounds superfluous.
For better or worse, that is ensured not by whether source code is open or closed but rather by simply sticking to industry standards, also known as using what everyone else is using. That means Microsoft Office by far and Google Docs to a lesser extent, whether anyone likes it or not.
I suppose I should put it out there I also like paying for and using Microsoft Office anyway. I get back much more than what I pay.
Every single business communique I've ever seen and conducted that's not PDF comes and goes in .docx/.xlsx/.pptx, though.
There was something like that for spreadsheets too but I can't remember what.
The only collaborative projects I had to work on were with customers so we always used Google Docs, nothing self hosted.
Reprex-ish: 1. Open this on iPhone Firefox: https://www.univer.ai/examples/sheets-big-data/ 2. Select a cell and drag down 3. It crashes once it hits row 1M-ish
I get that it might be some kind of memory limitation, but if so there should be guardrails to prevent the user from doing it
And a similar project for Photos, also end-to-end encrypted: https://github.com/ente-io/ente
