Problem

When a document gets opened, printed and closed, StarOffice asks whether the changes should be saved. Many users don't understand this and – depending on the current work situation – sometimes even feel uncertain about which decision they should make (Have I changed anything erroneously? Didn't I save my latest changes? ...)

Background

When a StarOffice application, like Writer, receives the “print” command, it performs a couple of actions before it actually prints the document:

Updating the document info (File – Properties) and set the “last printed” date.
Updating the fields in the document
Possibly reformatting the whole document because the printer driver used for printing is different from the printer driver the document was created for originally.

As it takes quite some engineering effort to find out whether or not these preparations actually change the document, the “modified” flag is set by default, as soon as an application starts the print preparations.

Of course it would be a better solution, if the applications knew whether changes were triggered by printing or by other actions. This would also give us the chance to change the warning message that's displayed when an unsaved, modified document gets closed. But the engineering cost to distinguish between the source of the changes is very high (first incomplete estimate: 1 week planning, at least 2 weeks of implementation, additional time for testing), and we don't feel like solving this problem is worth the cost.

Solution

As an alternative,more simple approach, we should offer an option that suppresses the modification of the “document modified” flag by the print process. This option would not be active by default, but if a user feels confused by the current behavior, he can choose to activate it.

Behind the scenes, the status of the “document modified” flag would be saved as soon as the printing process gets triggered and it would be reset to the saved value after printing has finished. Of course the changes mentioned above would still be made, it would be just the status of the document that's “locked” against changes. If the document has been modified before it was printed, the status after printing would be “modified”. If it has just been opened with no automatic changes (like triggered by macros or updated links), it would show the status “unmodified” after printing. If the user subsequently changes the document, the status would change accordingly, i.e. Switch to “modified”.

There are some disadvantages to this solution:

If the user doesn't save the document after printing, the changes will be lost, so the printed document is “newer” than the saved document
(This would also be the case if the user decides not to save the document when asked about this)
The “last printed” document info field would not contain the correct value
(same as above; today the field also doesn't get updated if a document is printed from the system shell (like from the context menu in Windows Explorer))

I consider these disadvantages to be a moderate price that the user pays for his convenience. And anyway, we would not make this setting the default, so the user himself would be responsible for changing this behavior.

How does the user learn about the new feature?

As described in the background section, we do not want to distinguish between general changes and changes triggered by the printing process. So we can't modify the warning message box that asks the user if his changes should be saved, because we don't know which changes caused this box to appear.

An alternative way to inform the user is to display the Help Agent together with the message box. The Help Agent leads the user to a description of this feature in our help system.

Further specification details

Add an option to Tools – Options – General
This is maybe not the most natural option page for this setting, but due to other dialogs being already “full”, this is the best compromise for this setting.
The option should be called: Printing sets “document modified” status. It should be preceded by a separator line labeled “Document status”
In German: Drucken setzt “Dokument geändert” Status (separator label: Dokumentstatus)

Action Items

Propose specification	Lutz Höger
Describe the feature and maybe the technical background	Frank Peters
Optionally save and restore the document status when printing	Mathias Bauer
Implement Tools – Options UI	Oliver Specht
Implement trigger for Help Agent	Oliver Specht
Write feature e-mail	Oliver Specht
Translate UI and documentation	Rafaella Braconi