Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 37511
Page style lost after saving file with a section set to hide under some condition.
Last modified: 2013-08-07 14:38:26 UTC
This is a subtle bug. It is present on both OOo 1.x and OOo 1.9m62. It applies to sxw, stw, oot and ott formats. Steps to reproduce the bug: 1) Create a new document. 2) Insert a section at the top. 3) With the cursor inside the section, change the page style (for example, to "Front Page"). 4) Save the file. 5) Open the file again, and the page reverts back to "Default" page style. *Notice*: This happens even when the section spans several pages. This is causing problems for the user guide tean. The Front Matter part of each chapter (title, overview, copyright and table of contents) is all in one section. We plan to hide it when the chapter is inserted in the master doc. The "work around" for this issue is to uncheck the "Hide" attribute of the section. This bug has been tested on Solaris and Windows, OOo 1.9m62, OOo 1.1.2, 1.1.3, and using sxw, stw, oot and ott files. I am attaching a sample file that illustrates the bug. Cheers, Daniel.
Created attachment 19535 [details] Sample file that illustrates the bug. It includes a section, and instructions to reproduce the problem.
I was able to replicate the problem even with OOo 1.9m58
I see a bug and a missing feature and I want to provide a work-around. The problem is caused by our way to define the page style. Normally it's a property of a paragraph! If you change the page style of your document to "First page" the first paragraph at the first page gets the property "Break page before with page style 'First page' ". So the document always want to start with a "Default" page style but the first paragraph says "First page". If the paragraph is hidden as part of a hidden section, its property is lost, the "Default" page style is the winner again. So far, so good. Bug: The bug is that even the condition to hide the section is false, the page style is set to "Default". But if we fix this problem, the page style will change if you really hide the section. I don't know if you like this behaviour?! So I could imagine the following feature. Feature: A document property page style which defines the page style of the first page if there's no paragraph with another page style. Work-Around: If your document starts with a small paragraph before the first section, you're able the set the wished page style at this paragraph and it will never got lost.
Hello Ama. Thank you for the explanation. > The problem is caused by our way to define the page style. Normally it's a > property of a paragraph! Yes. I'm reading the book "OOo XML Essentials" and I noticed that. That's odd, but it's not bad. If OOo did that on the first page we'd be happy. > But if we fix this problem, the page style will change if you really hide > the section. I don't know if you like this behaviour?! Actually, *yes*, that's the behaviour we want. Well, let me check we understand each other. If you fix this bug, the behaviour will be: * If the section is visible, the first page will have "First Page" style. * If the section is hidden, the first page will have "Default" style. Yes, this is what we want. I'll explain. In our template, the first 4 pages (exactly) are inside a section. The idea is that if you hide the section it's as if you had thrown out those pages. So it "makes sense" for the next page to keep whichever page style it has. Our document has two major components: * Pages 1-4: Front Matter -- title page, copyright, edits, etc. * Pages 5-*: Content -- the actual information of the document. Each of these two has its own page style. For example, the Front Matter uses Roman Numerals for page numbers and the body (content) of the document uses Arabic numbers. We want to be able to hide the Front Matter and only look at the content. Naturally, we would want the content of the document to keep its page style. > Work-Around: If your document starts with a small paragraph before the first > section, you're able the set the wished page style at this paragraph and it > will never got lost. And this work-around would do the right thing for people who want the first page to always have the same page style. After looking at this issue, I'm thinking that associating the page style with the first paragraph is not so bad. It allows you to effectively put a page inside a section. So when you hide the section, the page goes. Cheers, Daniel.
MRU->AMA: maybe we should implement an exception: if the very first paragraph of a document is in a section, the page break information should be handed to the para following the section (if this does not have an explicit page break attribute).
AMA->MRU: I'm not sure what you mean by handed to the following para. Do you mean when the section is hided? But I don't think that's a good idea. A section could contain a lot of pages and a lot of different pagebreaks. Which one should be handed to the next para? Daniel wants our behaviour the pagestyle should be defined by the _visible_ paragraphs. But at the moment we have a bug that the pagestyle can be "default" even the section is visible! This bug is annoying and we should fix it.
Hello? How's this issue comming? Any news? As I said earlier, all that needs to be fixed is this bug: AMA> Bug: The bug is that even the condition to hide the section is AMA> false, the page style is set to "Default". From what Ama said, if this bug is fixed, the resulting behaviour would be exactly what I would want (to have the page style change when I hide the section) and Ama's work around would work well for people who want the page style to remain fixed. And everyone's happy. How difficult would it be to fix this bug? I just want a rough indication, so I know what to expect. Something more specific than "OOo Later" :-) Cheers, Daniel.
Any progress on this? Any target milestone other than "OOo Later"? This is a problem for writing documentation in chapters and then combining them to make a book (for example, using a master document).
FME->dcarrera/jeanweber: Please have a look at my new attached file. It looks like somebody fixed this already (SRC680m156). If the section is visible, we have the page style "First page", otherwise "Default".
Created attachment 34541 [details] new bugdoc
Thanks. I'll have a look at your file as soon as I can (may not be for a few days, though) and also test some of my own files.
I think this problem has been fixed, and is no longer present in OOo 3.x, so the issue can be closed.