Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 85076
Calc won't print/preview documents containing only cell borders
Last modified: 2017-05-20 11:11:29 UTC
Calc will not print or page preview documents containing ONLY cell borders (i.e. no other content, only cell border changes). To reproduce: 1. Click File->New->Spreadsheet 2. Select cell B2 3. Click Format->Cells... 4. Click the Borders Tab 5. Under Line Arrangement/Default, click "Set all four borders" widget. 6. Click OK. There should now be a border around cell B2. 7. File->Page Preview. A blank page is shown. Printing fares no better; a blank page is generated.
Created attachment 50734 [details] sc-print-lines.diff
This would conflict with the description of "Suppress output of empty pages" in the online help. Also, if only single pages out of a larger sheet are concerned, I think the existing behavior is preferable.
Created attachment 50736 [details] Sample Spreadsheet
The point is that, as far as the user is concerned, when a cell has a border the docuement is NOT empty. See the attached "Sitzplan Physiksaal.ods" as an example -- it resizes cells and applies borders, but has no "content" (images, text, etc.). This is deliberate on their part, I assume because they want to print out the table and write on it by hand afterward. Yes, the online help says "Cell attributes such as borders or background colors are not considered cell contents," but I think this is counter-intuitive for most users, especially since the "Suppress output of empty pages" option is enabled by default.
Not sure if this matters, but in a survey of other spreadsheet programs... A major commercial known-by-everyone spreadsheet program considers cell borders and cell background color to be "content". KSpread (the KDE Spreadsheet program) doesn't make a "content" determination; it always prints something, even if the page is blank. Gnumeric is stricter about content than Calc; in order to print a cell, the cell must contain some content (e.g. a space). So in Calc for "Sitzplan Physiksaal.ods," a single space in ANY cell would allow EVERYTHING to be printed. In Gnumeric, ALL cells with borders would need to have a space in order for EVERYTHING to be printed. Given this, I think Calc should follow suit and consider cell borders and background to be considered as content, so that user expectations are met. (Really, who wants to dig through the Calc preferences dialog to find the "Suppress output of empty pages" checkbox, especially when most people [0] are going to consider a non-blank page NOT being empty, and thus won't think it applies to them anyway!) [0] "most people" statistic completely made up The key point is matching user expectations. Pointing to documentation isn't sufficient, as most people [0] don't read the documentation in the first place.
change target.
cc myself
cc mla.
*** Issue 95407 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***
set target to 3.1
due to short timeframe shifted to OOo 3.2
*** Issue 95293 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***
set target to 3.x
I'm adding this comment to all open issues with Issue Type == PATCH. We have 220 such issues, many of them quite old. I apologize for that. We need your help in prioritizing which patches should be integrated into our next release, Apache OpenOffice 4.0. If you have submitted a patch and think it is applicable for AOO 4.0, please respond with a comment to let us know. On the other hand, if the patch is no longer relevant, please let us know that as well. If you have any general questions or want to discuss this further, please send a note to our dev mailing list: dev@openoffice.apache.org Thanks! -Rob
Reset assigne to the default "issues@openoffice.apache.org".