impossible to create openoffice files in nautilus

[Matthew East]

It is not possible to create openoffice documents from nautilus by right
clicking and selecting "Create Document". In my case it says "no templates
installed". This is something that even Windows does quite well so I really
think such functionality should be built into Breezy if at all possible. Please
reassign if I haven't got the package right.

[Matthias Klose (doko)]

correct, but there are noo templates shown at all.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Matthias, what information do you need?

[Matthias Klose (doko)]

Sebastien Bacher schrieb:
> Matthias, what information do you need?

is it correct that this menu is empty? i.e. we do ship applications to
create new documents of some type, don't we have any template?
how do I add this information assuming I do have templates for various
OOo applications?

[Martin Kretzschmar (martink)]

The design of the Create Document menu was that the user copies template files to the ~/Templates directory. It is discouraged that distros install templates by default. The rationale was that this sub menu becomes unusable if dozens of applications install empty templates automatically. Or something like that. Probably explained somewhere in this thread:

http://mail.gnome.org/archives/nautilus-list/2003-December/msg00127.html

Maybe this:
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/nautilus-list/2003-December/msg00131.html

[Matthias Klose (doko)]

ok, rejected. works as intended.

[Matthew East (mdke)]

On Mon, 2006-03-13 at 23:35 +0000, Martin Kretzschmar wrote:
> Public bug report changed:
> https://launchpad.net/malone/bugs/23332
>
> Comment:
> The design of the Create Document menu was that the user copies template
> files to the ~/Templates directory. It is discouraged that distros
> install templates by default. The rationale was that this sub menu
> becomes unusable if dozens of applications install empty templates
> automatically. Or something like that. Probably explained somewhere in
> this thread:

The rational does not support the proposition. Yes, dozens of empty
templates would be a bad thing, however this does not mean that distros
should not install templates by default. One template for common
applications such as Openoffice.org Writer is not going to create
usability problems.

As it is, the ~/Templates directory is so un-obvious to anyone but an
experience user, that unless templates are shipped by default, there is
little point in having it exist.

Matt
--
<email address hidden>
gnupg pub 1024D/0E6B06FF

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

We had this discussion for warty and decided to not ship any Template I think. Copying stuff to users directory is tricky

[MattJ (mwild1)]

Is there any chance of re-considering the position on this bug?

- The "Create Document" submenu is familiar to ex-Windows users
- It doesn't work by default in Ubuntu
- They don't know how to make it work (and 95% of them won't try to find out). I have yet to see an Ubuntu setup with this menu not empty.

If copying to home directories is tricky then Nautilus should be fixed to import templates from /usr/share also.

IMHO this is a really bad usability bug.

[Matthew East (mdke)]

I'm going to reopen this bug to try out an idea - can a "~/Templates" directory be populated for all users in the same way that the ~/Examples folder is shipped? It would be really useful for Ubuntu to ship a few useful templates by default.

Nautilus still includes the "Create Document" feature, which is empty by default in Ubuntu, so it's actually confusing not to ship some templates.

[Chris Cheney (ccheney)]

Reassigned to nautilus to have someone on the desktop team more familiar with this topic to determine what should be done. Since no programs seem to setup templates for use properly perhaps there is a reason this has been done this way?

[Chris Cheney (ccheney)]

Just read some of the old comments in this thread. Yes, copying files into the users home directory probably should not be done. Perhaps extending Nautilus to read something like /usr/share/templates and then manage that directory closely so it doesn't become a mess for the average install of Ubuntu is something that would be useful?

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

The issue has been discussed upstream again recently, you can read about it on http://mail.gnome.org/archives/nautilus-list/2008-June/msg00123.html and why they consider having a such directory not a good thing

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

closing the request against that's not a bug but an upstream choice, you should raise the discussion on the lists rather

[PetrB (petr-bug)]

There was an discussion [1] on ubuntu-desktop list. The summary is that upstream (GNOME devs) is afraid that that packages will pollute the menu by too many items. If this happens distributions can fix those packages though [2][3]. There was an idea how to ease maintaining user's templates - its more difficult variant will solve problem of pollution by 3rd party packages and root-lacking user. [4]

[1] https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-desktop/2008-October/001816.html
[2] https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-desktop/2008-October/001834.html
[3] https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-desktop/2008-October/001819.html
[4] http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=558435