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------- Additional comments from [email protected] Thu Jan 22 05:47:52 +0000 2009 ------- I've read through nearly seven years of comments on this issue, and I don't understand the continued resistance to a Reveal Codes feature. Apparently many of the opponents to this feature: A) do not understand how the WP RC window functioned, and B) don't often have to deal with legacy documents. A) The WP Reveal Codes window was not a "license to kill codes." WP used--encouraged--styles just as OOo Writer does, although they weren't as sophisticated. You could, for instance, create a "quoted passage" style that inset the margins and changed the font, then apply it to whole sections of a document. In the RC window, there would appear a single tag for [Style On:Quoted] and another for [Style Off:Quoted]. You could not tweak the formatting within the style; you could only delete the [Style On] or [Style Off] tag (which automatically deleted the mated tag as well). If you wanted to override the style formatting in any way, you had to insert additional formatting--just as you do in Writer. (Yes, you could nest styles.) And if you deleted the [Style] tags, any other formatting tags remained in place, and remained in effect. RC did not replace styles and RC did not conflict with styles. In fact, RC made styles _easier _to _use_ for less technical people, because RC enabled you to see exactly what styles were applied, exactly where they started and ended, and exactly how they overlapped and interacted (or conflicted). B) I have a 200,000 word document in WP5.1 format. It has about 1200 occurrences of what Writer calls "character formatting". I would _like_ to convert it to something a bit more modern. When I convert it into Writer, neither of two things happens: The base font of the original is _not_ applied to the Default style in Writer, and the Default style in Writer is _not_ applied to the converted text. Instead, an invisible internal style is applied individually to every paragraph. (At least, that's the best I can figure out--I'm not experienced with XML.) The base font--the root formatting setting of the whole document!--is converted incorrectly. And I can't find a sensible way to fix it. Opponents to Reveal Codes would apparently have me believe the sensible thing to do is apply Default Formatting to the whole document, then manually reapply 1200 "character styles". If I'm understanding the XML code, it appears that all I really need to do is modify--or destroy--one hidden text style to fix my font problem. But the style in question doesn't seem to appear in the F11 Styles window, and I can't figure out how to modify it otherwise. A Reveal Codes window would (hopefully) offer me an approach to cleaning up such massive conversion problems without all of the manual reformatting required at present. Or, for the more sophisticated user, would make it easier to write a macro to automate the necessary corrections. ----- I quit using MS Word altogether because of its secrecy about formatting. All my documentation at work (dozens of documents) is now done in manually-coded HTML with external CSS stylesheets--because I find it easier to maintain! So far, I've not seen anything to recommend OOo Writer over MS Word except the price. The continued resistance to Reveal Codes implies that the developers don't want Writer to be anything more than a Word clone. Frankly, that's just not good enough for me. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Please do not reply to this automatically generated notification from Issue Tracker. Please log onto the website and enter your comments. http://qa.openoffice.org/issue_handling/project_issues.html#notification --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected] --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
