Showing posts with label breaks. Show all posts
Showing posts with label breaks. Show all posts

26 September 2007

Not so Much OOo as Oops!

Not from the world of OpenOffice.org, but amusing and relevant:

My favorite example of a "bad document" is one that I saw when I was in my first professional job working in the IT department of a large German furniture manufacturer. Someone from a sales department called me and said that his document breaks completely as soon as he changes two words to a bold face. I could not believe it and thus went upstairs in order to take a look at the issue myself. I also changed the two words to bold and, he was right, the whole document fell apart. For a few seconds I was wondering what was going on. Then I switched on the "view nonprinting characters" feature. There was the problem. The whole document, yes, the whole document, was just one single line of text. Everything including line breaks and tables were implemented using spaces. Thus, for sure, once one part of the document was modified, everything else fell apart.