I’m writing a document that has numbering.
Chapters have numbers and each section is numbered using Roman numerals.
I wanted to swap chapters 1 and 2.
In MSW you can put the document in outline mode (which does’t seem to exist in OO), change the number of displayed levels to 1, and move the sections.
All of the numbering stays together.
OO, on the other hand, does’t have this view. OK, says I, let’s just cut and paste the chapters. It’s a bit 1980’s but hey OO is free.
The section numbering goes west. The pasted in chapter is numbered 1, and the sub sections carry on from the earlier numbering.
Joy.
I tried loading it into AbiWord (not yet used in anger) but it was too confused. Left it for a day and had another go. Discovered that you can press return at the beginning of the line and it will do the numbering on the new line. Go back up, set the style to Normal and remove the line – then the numbering is correct. I have since loaded the filter add-ons for Abi and will maybe have a go just to see if it can do it.
This is a pain – most technical documents have numbered paras and OO just does’t seem to get it. MSW can do this without much of an issue. Maybe I missed something. I don’t have time to try and fix OO. maybe I’ll put a test case together and see if the developers can sort it out.
In my hunting on the net I discovered Lyx , which I am looking at at the moment. What You See Is What You Mean – uses Latex and then integrates lots of O/S tools to glue it all together. I’m thinking that this would be by far the better way of producing camera ready copy if I could only find the time to learn it. No issues with WYSIWYG numbering either – it just does it. I did once use these markup languages in another life (before decent word processors) and don’t mind them at all. Lyx just hides the complexity from you.
Also using Firefox 2.0 spell checker – useful.