Bug 154003

Summary: It is too cumbersome to switch the direction of an entire presentation
Product: LibreOffice Reporter: Eyal Rozenberg <eyalroz1>
Component: ImpressAssignee: Not Assigned <libreoffice-bugs>
Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE    
Severity: normal CC: libreoffice-ux-advise
Priority: medium Keywords: needsUXEval
Version: Inherited From OOo   
Hardware: All   
OS: All   
See Also: https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=153995
Whiteboard:
Crash report or crash signature: Regression By:
Bug Depends on:    
Bug Blocks: 43808    

Description Eyal Rozenberg 2023-03-06 10:21:33 UTC 
Scenario 1:

Suppose you get a presentation someone made in a Western, LTR, language, as an ODP file.

Now suppose you want to present the same thing, but in Arabic, Farsi, Fula or Hebrew. Or - you want to use the existing presentation as a basis which you then modify into something related.

----

Scenario 2:

You have a presentation template, intended for LTR presentations - which you want to use for an RTL one.

----


It is currently quite cumbersome, time-confusing, and possibly even difficult to switch the direction of the entire presentation.

You have two edit all of the master slides, flip the direction of the background (if not get into more serious editing), flip the positioning of items on the master slides, set directions of a lot of elements, since the directions don't inherit from some single "Default Slide Style"'s direction property, you need to flip table column orders (see bug 153995), and possibly some more tasks. And - some of the work needs to be done slide-by-slide, since you can't select items from many slides, certainly not without visiting the different slides.

Now, what I'm describing is not a bug; it's a problem. And I don't have a single solution to offer, but it is an uncatered-for user need which needs to be addressed somehow.
Comment 1 Heiko Tietze 2023-03-06 10:41:42 UTC 
What I can imagine to change automatically is
* position of fields such as page number 
* text direction

but I struggle with the artwork
* left/right-handed images for decoration vs. functional purpose (thinking of a progress through the slides)
* background images (simply mirroring is not going to fly)

My take: create special RTL templates. And we have bug 145730 where you agreed with me, for once, at least partially :-).

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 145730 ***
Comment 2 Eyal Rozenberg 2023-03-06 10:56:12 UTC 
(In reply to Heiko Tietze from comment #1)

What about existing presentations, though?

And what about templates which already exist? After all, most template creators will create LTR templates, not pairs of templates for RTL (Not to mention LRTB,  RLTB etc.)