Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 116668
objects disappear when pasting slide between presentations
Last modified: 2017-05-20 11:11:23 UTC
Steps: 1)open presentation at: http://lcbb4.epfl.ch/tmp/fastLong.odp 2)open presentation at: http://lcbb4.epfl.ch/tmp/reversals.odp 3) copy slide #50 (or any with a diagram) from fastLong.odp to reversals.odp. See that the objects disappear.
Created attachment 75688 [details] paste a slide FROM this file.
Created attachment 75689 [details] copy slide TO this presentation.
This also happens when pasting slides to a new presentation.
The drawings are still there, but the line style has been set to "invisible". I see the error already in OOo3.2.1. I doubt, that it has been unnoticed until now, but I do not find a duplicate issue. The background is lost too, but that's a new error and I will write a separate issue for it.
It has something to do with the user defined styles I have in fastLong.odp... Here is a workaround: 1. remove all the slides but those that we want to use from fastLong.odp. 2. paste all of the slides from reversals.odp into fastLong.odp. When pasting as originally stated in the bug report, the master slide is copied but not the styles. This workaround would not work if I had user defined styles in both presentations!
The linewidth of style "default" in reversals.odp is set invisible. When you paste the slide into it all lines from fastLong.odp which are on that style "default" are being adapted to unvisible. When pasting the slide into a new impress document the lines are visible because the style is not set to invisible there. You do not want to have your styles overwritten in the presentation you paste into by the styles that you used in the pasted slide. Please check why a fresh, empty doc has already set its default linestyle to invisble. This is not standard.
> You do not want to have your styles overwritten in the presentation you paste > into by the styles that you used in the pasted slide This is true. There are other ways to paste a slide so that it looks correct, however. These are a few possibilities: 1) copy the style but with a unique name. 2) copy the traits of each object without assigning it a style. 3) warn the user that the styles won't be copied I think 3 should be the absolute minimum since a normal user would think this was a bug, instead of a design decision. Option 2 makes it at least usable. If I can't copy slides from one presentation to another then the tool is useless. Option 1 may be the best option since it will work and cause the least grief to the user! On that note, is there a way for a user to copy styles from one presentation to another? > Please check why a fresh,empty doc has already set its default linestyle to > invisble. This is not standard. A fresh doc does not yeild an invisible default linestyle... what is pasted is not usable, however. See the attached pictures to get an idea. Imagine pasting 50 slides.
Created attachment 75706 [details] The slide that is going to be copied to another presentation.
Created attachment 75707 [details] The slide, after it's been pasted into the new presentation. Imagine pasting 50 of these at once.
Yes, it may look another way that you have wanted it. Or expected it. But that would be more like an enhancement than a bug, or? Since the given functionality works like it should. There are just options missing that shoud be implemented helping to import slides with other/same-named styles...
> Yes, it may look another way that you have wanted it. Or expected it. But that > would be more like an enhancement than a bug, eeek! Let's say you have a program call "sort" that takes as input a list of integers. I would expect that the output of the program would be a list in non-decreasing or non-increasing order. If you make a design decision that "sort" will return a list where only the even numbers appear in non-decreasing/increasing order, then I would report that as a bug. Since this function is called "copy" and "paste", I would expect that I could copy a slide from one presentation and paste into the other. The implication being that the slide that I copied will appear in the new presentation as it looked in the old; this is how "copy" and "paste" works for every other program I've ever used. Your telling me that I can copy a slide from one presentation to another and that it will look totally different because your design decision was to forget all of the objects attributes. I don't know about the rest of the people working on openoffice but I call this a bug!
Reassigned for decision: Bug or feature?
I understand that this is perceived as a bug from a user who does not use the style concept. I agree that we should by default paste a 'visual 1:1 copy'. Changing the default is not that easy. This would then be perceived as a bug from a user who wants to work with styles and templates. Also a history lesson from the early 90's, StarOffice 3.0 did actually made a visual 1:1 copy by also copy the master page. We then got complains from customers who's files grow larger and larger because they tend to use the same document always pasting and deleting slides so the list of unused master pages grow and grow. Since unused master pages must be deleted manually this could become an issue again for users who are not familiar with the styles/master page concept. (The 'obvious' solution "just delete all unused master pages automatically" does break the work with template documents so is no option.) So we have two options. Option one, do not copy the master page with the slide and put all style formating as hard formating to the shapes. This would still not be a 1:1 copy as the background and optional shapes from the master page would be missing. Also hard formating everything does not produce manageable documents. Option two is to copy the master page with the slide. Here lies another caveat. We would have to detect if the same master page is already present in the target document. Since 99% of the master page names will be "Default", we would have to compare the content of the master pages, including styles. This is a lot of development work to do if we want to do this fast enough without annoying the user. If we do not have a proper detection of identical master pages each drag and drop would create a new master page. This is to be avoided at all cost. If the above problems are solved and we change the default, we should have a non intrusive way (meaning no message box appearing for every paste/drop) that the user can later decide not to have a 1:1 copy since he want to work with his own template/master page. Something along the ms smart tags. As a summary, yes I agree that we have to do something here but it is not a simple fix and for some problems I do not have a proper idea yet how to fix them. This would all be much easier if we just drop the concept of styles in OOo. MS does not have them which makes their life so much easier. But for many users the availability of styles in OOo is a huge competitive advantage so I can't just take them out :-( I put this issue on enhancement since stuff has to be implemented to make the current behavior not appearing as a bug. This does not influence the time frame in which this issue will be fixed or not.
Thanks for giving such a clear and thorough description of the issues. There is one thing I don't understand... when I copy the files it does create a new master page. The new master just doesn't have the styles it should. I'm interested in a work around since this renders OO and much of my previous work nearly useless for me... I have 5 or so talks each with their own styles that I'm going to need to combine. I do many animations so I have a ton of slides. If I were to somehow copy the styles into my new presentation before doing the paste, wouldn't things look OK? If so, how can I dopy the styles?
*** Issue 117966 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***
Reset assigne to the default "issues@openoffice.apache.org".