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One feature that KWord has and OpenOffice doesn't, is the "create followup
frame on new page" feature. More precisely, that's the (default) mode for
text frames, which tells them to create a new page if they have more contents
than they can show, and to create a new frame at the same position on that
new page, with the overflowing contents.
The reason KWord has this feature since the start is obviously for the "main
text frames", since in KWord the main text is also considered to be inside a
text frame, and it's the standard behaviour for the main text, to create new
pages as needed.
However this can also be useful for other frames. Imagine doing the layout
for a magazine, and the first half of the first column has the beginning of an
article, which continues on all of the second page (the usual "the rest
of this article is on page N"). You can do that in OOWriter already, I think,
by creating the two pages independently and chaining the frames together
afterwards. But the idea of this feature is to save the user a bit of time,
by already creating a followup frame on the second page. He/she can then
resize/move that frame, it doesn't have to remain at the same position of
course (this is only the default position).
In OOWriter, as I understand it, if the contents of a text box overflows,
the box will either grow (if the min-height property was set) or remain
unchanged and ignore the overflow (if the height property was set).
(Please correct me if I'm misunderstanding something here).
What I'm suggesting is that a new attribute is added to draw:text-box, which tells explicitly
which behaviour is wanted, when the text is bigger than its containing frame.
The possible behaviours are: ignore, auto-extend-frame, and the new one
would be auto-create-new-frame. (Names are only suggestions coming from
the current KWord DTD, any better name is fine of course).
The name of the attribute could be, hmm, style:overflow-behaviour?
Of course this is only a flag for word processors, it doesn't change in any way
how a document actually looks like when opening it, so IMHO it doesn't matter
much if e.g. OO doesn't support it.
- --
David FAURE, faure@kde.org, sponsored by TrollTech to work on KDE,
Konqueror (http://www.konqueror.org), and KOffice (http://www.koffice.org).
How to write a Makefile.am for KDE/Qt code:
http://developer.kde.org/documentation/other/makefile_am_howto.html
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