Sixteen Volts

Since I received the word from the editor that the fonts and layout of the manuscript are now OK, and the content is therefore not going to move any more, I spent this morning by compiling the table of contents and the index to the book. I have now converted all parts of the manuscript to PDF files and emailed them to the editor for the final review and corrections. And that should be it, then.

Compiling the index was an interesting semi-automatic process which I had to hand-tune after the computer had done its work. For some reason, OpenOffice index builder didn't understand that in Finnish, ä and ö are the last two letters of the alphabet, but insisted on building the index so that there letters are treated the same way as the ordinary a and o. This even though I selected "Finnish" as the sorting criterion. But at least this little flaw wasn't hard to correct with a simple combination of find, cut and paste.

More seriously, compiling the index revealed that OpenOffice had helpfully tried to help me by modifying some parts of program code so that ZParseError had become ZparseError. Again, a simple find and replace corrected this, but even so, that was very annoying.

However, these two were small potatoes. I accidentally revealed something that is, in my opinion, an absolutely inexcusable design flaw in OpenOffice. This usability flaw is so destructive and insidious that had I not felt a little tingle in my stomach and gone back to check if my intuition was right, the effect of the flaw would have gone unnoticed and pretty much ruined the whole manuscript. This makes me so angry right now that I am seriously considering giving up OpenOffice altogether, going back to Emacs + LaTeX for all writing work that I am going to do in the future. At least those two don't try to be helpful in detrimental ways.

First, a little background. When you use Find, OpenOffice will search forward from the cursor position, and when the search reaches the end of the document, the program asks you if you want to continue the search from the beginning of document. The same thing happens if you use Replace. These operations automatically stop at the end of the document, so you can limit their effect to the desired part of the document by selecting the starting position appropriately.

Using this logic, what you do think will happen if you press "Replace all" instead of "Replace"? Answer: OpenOffice will silently perform the search and replace in the whole document. I repeat: search and replace do not take place between the cursor position and the end of the document, like a reasonable person might think. Oh no, the search and replace take place silently in the whole document.

It makes me woozy to even think about what would have happened if I hadn't felt a healthy suspicion about the interaction designers of OpenOffice after I had used the "Replace All" to make a certain change throughout the index at the end of the book. And this happened this close to the time when the manuscript had already been proofread and is just to be converted to PDF form and sent to printer. I wouldn't have checked its content any more until the time that I am holding it in my hands in printed form. But then it would have been far too late.

I am sorry, but I don't think that I could possibly trust any program that can fuck up several months of the user's important work that nonchalantly. Once this book is finished so that I am holding it in my hands, I will uninstall the whole program and will never go back to it again. One close scare like this is quite enough for me, thank you.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Tuesday, March 14, 2006 at 9:49 AM