Bug 168705 - Implement a view mode similar to MS Word's "Draft View"
Summary: Implement a view mode similar to MS Word's "Draft View"
Status: UNCONFIRMED
Alias: None
Product: LibreOffice
Classification: Unclassified
Component: Writer (show other bugs)
Version:
(earliest affected)
Inherited From OOo
Hardware: All All
: medium enhancement
Assignee: Not Assigned
URL:
Whiteboard:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks: View-Canvas
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Reported: 2025-10-05 13:33 UTC by Eyal Rozenberg
Modified: 2025-10-08 22:00 UTC (History)
5 users (show)

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Description Eyal Rozenberg 2025-10-05 13:33:28 UTC
Microsoft Words offers several "views" of documents which we don't offer explicitly (or at all). One of these seems to be "Draft View". As described here [1]:

> Draft View in Microsoft Word simplifies the writing process by allowing users to focus solely on text and content without the distractions of headers, footers, and other formatting elements.

This is unlike Web Layout view, which also eschews pagination, footers and headers, but extends to the width of the page, ignoring paragraph styles; and also renders images and other objects which, in Draft View, are not rendered.

I believe a Draft View is useful when editing a document, because:

* Pagination is mostly, if at all, important at the late stages of editing (especially since, initially, one can't predict what would fit on each page anyway) and
* Pagination can be slow in large documents.
* Rendering all sorts of graphical and external objects, with surrounding text, is sometimes slow on slower hardware; and may be a little distracting from editing the actual text.

So, I suggest we introduce this to Writer as well.


[1] - https://www.nobledesktop.com/learn/microsoft-word/exploring-different-document-views-in-microsoft-word#draft-view-focusing-on-text-and-content
Comment 1 V Stuart Foote 2025-10-05 22:53:55 UTC
Rather seems another dupe of bug 37817 and its dupes.
Comment 2 Eyal Rozenberg 2025-10-06 07:10:33 UTC
(In reply to V Stuart Foote from comment #1)
> Rather seems another dupe of bug 37817 and its dupes.

IIUC, that proposal is rather different:  It proposes a _post-pagination_ view, with all objects laid out; the Draft view is not like that.

Now, it's true that the more views we have, the less appealing is adding another one, and that each of these two suggestions would reduce somewhat the appeal of the other one - but they're not dupes.
Comment 3 Heiko Tietze 2025-10-06 07:40:14 UTC
Not a fan of the idea to have views as a predefined combination of settings. But I can empathize with the idea to hide footnotes.

Ultimately a duplicate of 37817, as Stuart said. No benefit to have another ticket.
Comment 4 Dieter 2025-10-06 16:20:17 UTC

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 37817 ***
Comment 5 Eyal Rozenberg 2025-10-06 17:27:27 UTC
(In reply to Heiko Tietze from comment #3)
> Ultimately a duplicate of 37817, as Stuart said. 

No it isn't, and I explained why.

> No benefit to have another
> ticket.

The number of tickets is not a consideration regarding whether two things are a dupe or not; either they are, or they aren't, and this isn't.