Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

Currently, there are efforts underway to change the way the law can be accessed in the U.S. Right now, the law is effectively under the control of a duopoly: West and LexisNexis. There are movements to make the law freely available.

One of the obstacles to making the law freely available is the current system of citation. Legal citation is made to pages in a books of opinions called reporters (which are controlled by the two companies above).

There is an alternative proposed to use paragraph based citation in which the paragraphs are numbered.

One of the obstacles for adoption of this universal citation is the lack of software to support this. There is a need for text processing and typesetting software that can flexibly handle paragraph numbers.

The numbering I am talking about is in addition to the paragraph numbering currently available in two ways. First, the citation numbering is in addition to list numbering. If a court opinion had a numbered list, those paragraphs would also have a citation paragraph number that runs consecutively throughout the document. Second, the number position needs to be flexible. The ideal location is centered on the paragraph, off to the left of the text margin.

The citation paragraph number needs to be able to be embedded as an attribute of the paragraph so that it is invariant when exchanged with different text processing systems.

Can you upload an example?

Interesting. But there's nothing we can do about it here.

This sounds like an issue that should be addressed to the Apache OO project mailing list, together with an enhancement request (assuming the proposal goes forward).

I'm not sure how much support the proposal should get, seeing as how there's no current software that supports it.

[Tutorial] Reporting bugs or suggestions

Edit: PS:

You can come reasonably close to what you want by enclosing the entire text in a table, one pp per row, with paragraph numbering in the left column. You can make cross references to the pp numbers; as long as you're careful about moving the content around, then the cross references should be updated correctly.

I have some sample images but I apparently cannot (or do not see how to) attach them to a post.

The larger problem is how to get the courts to switch over to free access to the law model. In order to do so, they will need a software package that can generate a freely accessible opinion without any hacks. THere are some other requirements as well but the one I described is the major one that goes contrary to how things work now.

I am raising this problem to all the vendors or work processing software I can find and whoever picks up the ball first is likely to be the one to run with it.

I have some sample images but I apparently cannot (or do not see how to) attach them to a post.

You can upload attachments in the Full editor Screen.

Unfortunately, the size limits on the site will not allow me to upload anything useful to illustrate the concept. If I reduce an example so that it is small enough to upload, the result is just a blur.

An option, in that case, is to upload to a site like Dropbox, then attach a link to the file(s) in Dropbox.
Alternatively making a zip/rar of the files, then uploading the zip/rar, will allow us to see the full size, while maintaining the size restrictions of the site.
Note: I do not guarantee that zipping/rarring the files will make them small enough for the zip/rar to be uploaded.