Re: [oiic-formation-discuss] The importance to users of documentslooking the same

[Sander Marechal <sander.marechal@tribal-im.com>]

Radoslav Dejanovi?? wrote:
> I'd say that while retaining perfect rendering is crucial for things
> like images, I do not think that it does matter for, say, a spreadsheet
> or a letter to retain perfect alignment or flawless table boundaries, as
> long as important data - text, numbers, formula, etc.
> 
> What I really care is, as I said - to get information from A to B -
> intact.

The problem seems to be that, at the moment, the data does not arrive
intact. It's not that the layout isn't pixel-perfect the same between
applications, but the layout can vary wildly between applications. This
presents a problem because indexes, references and table-of-contents,
page numbering, etcetera are all wrong for example. The longer the
document, the more wrong they are.

The problem is even bigger with manually inserted page-breaks for
example. Suppose application Foo renders in such a way that some heading
is near the bottom of a page. The user creates a custom style to insert
a page break before that paragraph so that the header, the paragraph
following it and the image following that are all on the same page
(perhaps the paragraph references the pictire, so it looks nice to have
it on the same page).

Along comes application Bar and it renders differently. Now the heading
would be rendered halway down a page, or near the top. Because of the
manual page-break you now have a nearly empty page in your document. Ugly...

I agree that we pixel-perfect isn't required, but there is plenty of
room for improvement at the moment without doing pisel-perfect. Leave
that to PDF :-)

-- 
Sander