[Allen Wicks]

Originally Posted by Brian

I don't think there's any dispute that they'd be useful...

No disrespect intended, but a problem for years now has been that the OO team apparently has always just seen cloning as a perhaps "useful" feature. There must be a reason that after having been repeatedly requested since version 1 cloning still has not been implemented. All kinds of far-lesser-value tweaks have been added in 3.9 versions - and the "Pro" version exists to monetize such a feature - so I can only assume that the team fails to appreciate the real value of cloning.

Cloning is much more than simply useful, it is an essential component of truly professional outline processing. I do not say that to dis OO or the team, but the fact is that with cloning I would literally be living in the OO app, much like I did with MORE; today without cloning I often just use (and refer users of the 9 Macs I manage) to free apps like TextEdit.

...the main thing I think we struggle with are how they'd interact with the other features we have.

The short answer to that is that I would hope that Omni engineers would have a copy of MORE up and running on an old box to review cloning. Obviously the apps and code are not identical, but a good start would be to integrate cloning similar to the way MORE did 20 years ago. (If you do not have a working copy of MORE I can probably find a retired but operational old Powerbook running MORE that you could have.)

A couple of the questions I've seen folks discuss:

I will try to respond, but it has been decades since I used the feature so my comments will likely have some inaccuracies.

How would cloned rows interact with the level-based styles?

That answer is fairly easy. Cloned text takes the style defined by its new location.

How would cloned rows affect summary cells they descend from?
What happens if a cloned row contains a summary cell? Or can you only clone leaf rows, and not branches?

This is one of those cases where a feature appears to be simple - arguably, you'd want the app to react to a row you cloned in the same way it does to a row you pasted into several places. (With edits propagating, of course.)

Yes, it is like live Cut-and-Paste but with styles defined by the new location.

The code that goes into presenting a simple appearance is often not simple to write, though...

Perhaps. But cloning is an essential feature and after 5 years of OO development the cloning feature is much too important to continue to ignore.

Again, no disrespect is intended.

-Allen Wicks