Hi Martin,
Thanks for all the great work you and Dom have been doing to finally slap a
UI on styles. It's been far too long since I did the original backend work!
At 12:19 PM 5/13/01 +1000, Martin Sevior wrote:
> I would like to open another debate about styles again. Right now
>if a property is not defined in a style it gets set to the default
>value. Consequently if I delete the font-family property in a style and
>apply it to a paragraph, the paragraph gets it's font-family set to "Times
>New Roman". I would rather the font-family is left at it's current
>setting.
>
>What I want to do is define a style like "LightBlue". All this does is
>change the colour of a paragraph to "LightBlue" leaving all other
>properties untouched.
I'm confused. The backend should already support this. See the definition
and use of the "Highlight" character-level style in the following document:
abi/test/wp/Styles.abw
>The "delete properties" button allows this for the
>definition but the application of the style screws things up.
Could you give more details on the problem you're seeing here? I'd try it
myself, but I think the other platform maintainers have been waiting for the
styles UI to settle down and get added to abi/shots/wp before implementing
the matching dialogs.
The UI should certainly allow you to define a style with only a single
property. In fact that's the most commonly useful kind of style.
>I think this can be fixed in the backend but the question is should this
>be the default behaviour or should it be a new type of style? Should we
>have "Paragraph Overlay" and "Character Overlay" type styles that only
>apply the definitions present to the text,leaving all else untouched?
>
>Opinions please! My present inclination is to make styles only affect
>properties defined in the style but I'm sure the Abi designers had their
>reasons for doing things the way they did.
In your vocabulary, *all* styles should be defined as "Overlay" styles. Or
at least, that's how I wrote the cascading mechanism.
Has this gotten broken somehow since then?
Paul,
extremely puzzled
