GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 524710
Implement document-specific settings/preferences for OOo
Last modified: 2018-02-08 12:55:45 UTC
Situation 1: Every time a user opens a given Calc spreadsheet and wants to use dynamic headers, those headers have to be defined. Situation 2: A user might care about one set of text attributes for one document, and an entirely different set of text attributes for another. If the user will be working on these two documents on an ongoing basis, this will necessitate regular trips to the Preferences dialog to adjust these settings. I can come up with other situations if need be. :-) But the point is, it would be useful if we had a way whereby the user could save preferences unique to a particular OOo document and those preferences would automatically "kick in" when that document was opened/given focus. (Other screen readers have implemented this functionality.)
This is undoubtedly going to take some thought and discussion, but I figured I'd toss out my number one pet peeve about what another screen reader does so that hopefully we can avoid doing that. ;-) Said other screen reader uses the file name as the basis for associating preferences with a given document (which I suppose is fine) BUT it makes that association rather automatically and immediately. For instance, if I create a new document in Excel, add data to it, set all sorts of cool document-unique preferences, and then save my document (which is what a lot of people do), two things happen: 1. My preferences do NOT get associated with my document, because at the time I established those preferences my document had a different name. 2. My preferences automatically kick in each and every time I launch Excel in the future because at the time I established those preferences, my document was called Book1 and each time you launch Excel, you're put in a blank workbook called Book1. <rant> We have an entire lab full of computers at the Carroll Center, and all bets are off as to what will and will not be spoken because of this sort of thing. Makes for fun workshops though. <crosses eyes> </rant> Thanks for listening. :-)
Planning spam. Sorry!
I would love to take this one on. I would especially like to have document-specific settings saved at the document level. I've mainly thought about saving the dynamic row and column headers for Calc and for tables in Writer. But now that the Orca settings are moving to gconf and then to g-settings, I'm really not sure where the document-specific stuff should go. I'm leaning towards a flat file in the user's .orca or that other new place where the new orca directories are going; call it something like calc.ini and writer.ini for example. I would wanna start out by just doing row and column headers but could add other options as we think of them. Just use a keyword system matching the keys in g-settings. Please assign to me if you like; this should be an interesting project.
Steve I'm not *positive* but I still think this might be a gconf/gsettings thing.... At least ultimately. Given that.... Some of the other items I saw you pick, I will be happy to work with you on. On this particular bug, you really should consult with Juanje Ojeda and Alejandro Leiva (aka "Ale"). Thanks for your interest!
(In reply to comment #3) > I would love to take this one on. I would especially like to have > document-specific settings saved at the document level. Hi Steve, this bug is closely related to current work doing in profiles but if we can colaborate with you as beta tester for this feature would be awesome.
Yes that would be an excellent idea. I'm just now trying to organize the bugs I would be interested in and want to have assigned formally. As I may have discussed outside this bug, I think the settings could go in wherever we will be storing any soffice specific parameters and the UI config page could contain a table of file names and have columns across which could for now, save the row and columns to be saved. I understand Joanie's concern with linking the dynamic headers to specific file names but I'm not sure at this point how else to do it. Perhaps a save type dialog could be offered when these rows are set and one could fill in a file name if different than the current document. Frankly that sounds combersome to me at the moment but we will be needing something to tell Orca to save these settings. If it is done with a button on demand, then one could save the file under whatever name desired and then press the button to save the row and column specs and then it would be associated with the new file name. With this situation, the dynamic headers would only be saved on demand instead of plain automatically doing it. That should get around the previously sited issue with mixed up documents and possibly wrong dynamic headers. Please assign to me, if you haven't already done so. Thanks.