Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 71626
Manual page breaks surrounded by hidden text must become disabled when text is hidden.
Last modified: 2013-08-07 14:38:26 UTC
The sample document contains the following text (<PB> marks a manual page break inserted via Insert/Manual Break.../Page Break) A <PB> b <PB> c d e All text except for the A at the beginning is hidden. This has been done by marking everything from after the "A" until the end of the document with the mouse, then right-click/Character.../Font Effects/Hidden. The expected result would have been a single page with "A" on it. The actual result is 3 pages of which 2 are empty. In other words the page breaks are not hidden. Only if you hide the "A", too, will the page breaks disappear. This behaviour is different from MS Word, unexpected and IMHO doesn't make any sense at all for the user.
Created attachment 40636 [details] Manual page breaks in hidden text are still visible
I checked with "2.0.2 German version WIN XP: [680m5(Build9011)]" and can confirm the reported behaviour, but I am not sure whether that is a bug. I would expect that behaviour, because a page break is not a character, and so I would not have expected that such "non characters" will be hidden. But I see some inconsitence: Function "Hidden" of menu "Format - Character - Font Effects - Effects" also works for non characters (images, drawings), I believe that's wrong. Yo can check that with a document containing text and some pictures in it. If you only mar a picture, "Format - Characters" will be greyed out, but I if you mark the complete document, images will be hidden together with the characters. Same effect for OLE-Objects, Frames, hirizontal lines, fields, but not for tables and page breaks, they will remain. I do not have any Idea what the desired behaviour might be. This issue is related to issue 71627.
If in doubt, do what MS Word does. Right now we have an MS Word document (the sample document I attached) that displays and prints differently in MS Word and OOo. That *is* a bug. You could argue that this bug should be fixed in the import/export filter, however I see no way that could be done without making page breaks disappear when hidden, because there's no way to emulate Word's behaviour AFAICS. BTW, the current behaviour is a big problem for my organization (several 1000 Office users). Is there anyone who benefits from it to counterweigh this?
@mux2005 Of course, we want to have good results for WORD import, but if the current OOo behaviour concerning page breaks between hidden characters (and other elements) is as intended, we have to change the import filter, if not, we have to fix the "page view processor". Specification under a.m. URL seems to state that the main goal of this feature is interoperability to MS, and so you may be right. It seems that correction of the current behaviour is one of the "Future Tasks" as described in 4.0.9 of specification "hidden_text.sxw". @mux2005 You should vote for this issue
Also in my opinion it does not make sense to display empty, unaccessible pages when "hiding" text surrounding page breaks.
I was able to reproduce this bug on WinXP using OO Writer Build 2.1 and Linux using Build 2.0.4. The mentioned reproduction steps were very useful. When all characters within a document were hidden, all characters were hidden as expected. Hence, the extra pages were hidden. Also, when all characters are hidden, it is impossible to type new characters, since the cursor guide does not show up on the page anymore, which is very inconvenient for the user. However, if only a few characters are hidden, including the page breaks, then the extra pages still appear, but they cannot be written to. This occurs regardless of where the page breaks are (at the beginning, end or middle of the document). Additionally, when CTRL-A is applied after the page breaks are hidden (to select everything in the document), no text is highlighted. It seems that OO Writer does not recognize the presence of the unhidden character. However, you are able to manually highlight the text by moving the cursor. This, again, is very inconvenient if a user is working on a large document. The only way around this seems to be making the top margin larger than the bottom margin and adding a new line character at the beginning of the file. This way, the top and bottom margins look similar, and the user is still able to write when all text, except for the first line, is hidden.