Bug 78911 - Make "Apply manual breaks" the default for Calc
Summary: Make "Apply manual breaks" the default for Calc
Status: NEW
Alias: None
Product: LibreOffice
Classification: Unclassified
Component: Calc (show other bugs)
Version:
(earliest affected)
4.2.4.2 release
Hardware: All All
: medium enhancement
Assignee: Not Assigned
URL:
Whiteboard:
Keywords: needsDevEval, topicUI
Depends on:
Blocks: Calc-Page-Break Options-Dialog-Calc
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Reported: 2014-05-19 13:59 UTC by Karl Behler
Modified: 2020-03-09 13:27 UTC (History)
6 users (show)

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Description Karl Behler 2014-05-19 13:59:05 UTC
As a solution to 40788 the scaling of spreadsheets for printing has been slightly modified to make it more robust against faulty user settings and simultaneously a flag has been created to allow manual breaks. Under tools > options > calc > print the flag "always apply manual breaks" can now be set as the default behavior of Calc. However, this flag is unset by default.

In fact up to release 3.2 (including corresponding OpenOffice/StarOffice releases) applying manual breaks in Calc sheets was the standard behavior. This was withdrawn in 3.3 and following releases because of a misconception of a couple of printing error reports which were caused by faulty user settings not properly handled by Calc. In the following the withdraw feature of manual breaks in Calc sheets raised a couple of bug reports which were summarized in 40788.

Now as a solution to all this mess we ende up with a pretty robust new scaling of spreadsheets to a certain width and height of pages which even works when users are requesting lesser number of pages than number of manually inserted breaks. But this behavior is disabled by default!!!

Why not making "Apply manual breaks" the default for Calc sheets again as it was the original behavior??? 
Just turn the meaning of the flag in tools > options > calc > print to "disable manual breaks, when sheet scaling is automatic". This is much more logical than allowing to insert manual breaks in spreadsheets and than requiring the users to find deep down in the options settings where to finally enable these manual breaks which are first inserted so easily.

(Bug 40788 was last managed by tibby. May be tibby should have a look at this too.)

Karl
Comment 1 bfoman (inactive) 2014-05-19 20:42:55 UTC
Changed summary.
Comment 2 Robinson Tryon (qubit) 2014-12-22 07:53:19 UTC
(In reply to Karl Behler from comment #0)
> Why not making "Apply manual breaks" the default for Calc sheets again as it
> was the original behavior??? 
> Just turn the meaning of the flag in tools > options > calc > print to
> "disable manual breaks, when sheet scaling is automatic".

I just pinged a Calc dev for input here. UX might also have some suggestions.
Comment 3 Robinson Tryon (qubit) 2014-12-22 17:08:22 UTC
(In reply to Karl Behler from comment #0)
> (Bug 40788 was last managed by tibby. May be tibby should have a look at
> this too.)

UX/Tibby: Thoughts on this enhancement?

Thanks!

--R
Comment 4 Karl Behler 2014-12-23 11:57:17 UTC
Please see the lengthy discussion on the original bug. Some comments may help to understand why there is still work to be done to handle manual breaks easily:
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=40788#c53

Also the following duplicate discussion to 40788 shows that people run into misconceptions when scaling to page width and height does not work on it's own but requires an additional setting somewhere else.

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=69584#c2

All the best, Karl
Comment 5 Robinson Tryon (qubit) 2015-12-13 11:24:02 UTC Comment hidden (obsolete)
Comment 6 Xisco Faulí 2019-11-29 13:28:55 UTC
Changing priority back to 'medium' since the number of duplicates is lower than 5
Comment 7 Xisco Faulí 2020-03-09 13:27:47 UTC
Please add keyword 'needsUXEval' and CC 'libreoffice-ux-advise@lists.freedesktop.org' if input from UX is needed.