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LibreOffice wee (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 11 months ago by to c/whitepeopletwitter@sh.itjust.works
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Now. Why am I wrong for Libre

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[–] 11 points 11 months ago (20 children)

Paginated formats still have advantages even if they are never printed. It just makes referencing stuff so much easier, if you can say "page 451, second headline, third paragraph".

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  • [–] 5 points 11 months ago (7 children)

    Even easier, for a markdown (text) file, you could just tell someone the line to go to.

    If people used markdown instead, then everyone would have nice text editors installed which would make this easy.

    Not to mention how much faster searching through a text file is compared to a word doc (eg, you could ctrl+f the headings name and have a result instantly).

    If stuff like this was adopted, integrations could be very nice (with easier solutions than saying "go to x page and look for x header", I could even imagine links being a thing assuming this feature is developed).

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  • [–] 4 points 11 months ago* (4 children)

    Not to mention how much faster searching through a text file is compared to a word doc (eg, you could ctrl+f the headings name and have a result instantly).

    Why don't you just ctrl+f in a word doc/PDF? That's still possible, but it's not exactly of much help in many cases. E.g. if the headline you are looking for is the name of a basic concept that appears all over in the document. Page 512 only appears once.

    All other forms of indexing are content-dependant. Indexing by page works the same on any page-based document.

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago (3 children)

    You can of course, but I was specifically pointing out how slow word is when doing any search query.

    Page 512 or line 10054, more or less the same thing right?

    Didn't think about duplicate header names, in those cases I guess you would need to be given a line number to go to if someone's sharing a section for you to see.

    I don't use word collaboratively that heavily so maybe people telling you to "see page 512" is common and I can see how saying "go to line 100512" is harder. I'm sure nothing would stop editors from introducing a feature for fake page numbers.

    There will always be certain drawbacks though, most may be fixed by editors having nice UX, others maybe not.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago (2 children)

    A good example for what I mean with the header names is e.g. the datasheet of a microcontroller. For e.g. the Atmega328p, that's a PDF with a few hundred pages.

    If you search for a section explaining a feature, and you CTRL+F for the name of the feature, which is the headline of the corresponding section, you will get matches for the same exact string of characters all over the document: first in the feature list in the beginning of the document, then on the pinout, then in the text of any other feature that references the feature you are looking for, then in the appendices and lastly in the glossary. Somewhere in the middle of these potentially 100s of matches will be the correct one.

    After a while of using that document, you will have the most important page numbers memorized.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago (1 child)

    But how are you going to package it as part of a subscription and make billions off that idea? You need to go back to capitalism school!

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (11 children)

    Nahhhh, you gotta think outside the box. You can tell people section 3, subsection 2, etc. even without pages. I'm addition, check this out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_element#Anchor Click that. See the little but at the end? #Anchor? We can already use URI fragments to link to specific sections.

    "But JackbyDev, I'm not linking to a specific section of something in an outline, I need to link to a specific part of long form content, like a novel. I can only do that with pages."

    That's a good point, but modern browsers have a way to deal with that too. This is where text fragments help: they allow the link author to have full control over what text to link to, without requiring any special markup in the target document. You can use #:~:text= to link to specific blocks of text.

    Edit: Lemmy is reformatting that for some reason and makes it not work. Try copying and pasting the below for a working example.

    https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/URI/Reference/Fragment/Text_fragments#%3A%7E%3Atext=This+is+where+text+fragments+help%3A+they+allow+the+link+author+to+have+full+control+over+what+text+to+link+to%2C+without+requiring+any+special+markup+in+the+target+document.

    Edit 2: Apparently Lemmy reformats links in preformat snips. Amazing. 🫩 Maybe slap this into the URL bar en-US/docs/Web/URI/Reference/Fragment/Text_fragments#:~:text=This%20is%20where%20text%20fragments%20help%3A%20they%20allow%20the%20link%20author%20to%20have%20full%20control%20over%20what%20text%20to%20link%20to%2C%20without%20requiring%20any%20special%20markup%20in%20the%20target%20document. after pasting https://developer.mozilla.org/ Nothing more frustrating that trying to show people a very cool and useful feature of browsers only for a different tool to just ruin it.

    Edit 3: Fuck me for suggesting something cool and interesting, I guess.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago* (10 children)

    I think you just proved my point.

    None of that is nearly as simple and accessible to non-techy people as page numbers. A page number would also not have been scrabled by Lemmy.

    (I of course do know about link anchors and all that, but it's just a hassle to use.)

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago (9 children)

    No, that's a Lemmy bug. If it's screwing up URLs like that it could affect other URLs too. Not a bug of text fragments. Text fragments are still relatively new. Firefox only began supporting them last year. Annoyingly, to create then in Firefox you still need to go into about:config or use an extension. But still, the idea that we should favor paginated format just because you can say "page blah" when we have better ways is foolish. Saying "Search for the phrase 'blah blah blah'" works equally well without text fragments.

    And yes, it's annoying that anchor links are too difficult to link to. But again, the idea that we should accept all the baggage of paginated formats just because anchors tend to be done incorrectly is foolish as well.

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  • [–] 0 points 11 months ago (8 children)

    The point was that text fragments, link fragments and even "search for the phrase X" are things that are brittle and require software support that's not necessarily a given. Having to enable experimental features of adding extensions are far too much hassle for the average user.

    I honestly don't see what "baggage" paginated formats have. If you don't like pagination, turn it off in your PDF viewer. That's much easier to do than to get all software in your tool chain to work correctly with text fragments.

    Not a bug of text fragments.

    This is a pretty foolish statement. It's totally immaterial "who" is at fault if the feature doesn't work. You did not manage to send a working text fragment over Lemmy. Doesn't matter what in the chain screwed up.

    I can tell you the page to turn to via a phone call or even in person. Try sending a text fragment by telling it to someone. Text fragments are a nice little feature but far too technical to adequately replace pagination in all circumstances.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago (7 children)

    How often are you in the scenario that you you're on a phone call and need to tell someone where something is in a document versus communicating with them online where you can send a link though? Every work meeting I've been in for the past nearly a decade now has been through something like Teams, Slack, Zoom, etc. where I can send text.

    Also PDF viewers are the baggage in the scenario. Everyone uses web browsers everyday. PDF viewers are the odd one out in the majority of people's "tool chains".

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  • [–] 0 points 11 months ago (6 children)

    Which browser do you use that doesn't have an integrated PDF viewer?

    PDF is just another file format, and compared to websites it's a really light format without active scripting. No tracking, no intrusive ads, no malware, no fishing, just a plain format that displays content and does nothing else.

    Web browsers are baggage in that scenario.

    And yes, I do talk to people. We do do in-person meetings.

    And it's a little weird that you have to downvote every post just because you can't stand that people might have other opinions than you.

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  • [–] 0 points 11 months ago (3 children)

    And it's a little weird that you have to downvote every post just because you can't stand that people might have other opinions than you.

    Because I just wanted to show you a cool feature and due to a bug totally out of my control you use that as a chance to be condescending.

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  • [–] 0 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    No, I took the bug as an example to show why the feature is a nice addition but not a replacement of older, easier and more resilient forms of sharing a location in a document.

    You apparently can't handle talking to someone who has a different opinion, and now I am going to be condescending, because that's a sign of a very brittle personality.

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  • [–] 0 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    compared to websites

    When did this become about websites? I was always suggesting HTML files over PDF files.

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  • [–] 0 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

    What is another name for HTML files?

    Or to put it differently: When was the last time you sent a HTML file over eMail or some other way except sending the URL to a website?

    Also, to use text fragment links you need to have the page hosted on a webserver. Can't send links to local files since you don't know the full path it will end up under on the local file system.

    So if you just want to send a file and a reference to which part of the file you are talking about, you now need to either host the file on a webserver or have the recipient rewrite the link to include the path where they ended up putting the HTML file. Talk about baggage here.

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