On Thu, 16 Feb 2012, Stuart Rackham wrote:
As I understand it (and I'm not 100% sure I do), ODF outputs can be styled
using a .styles file (for generating .fodt files using asciidoc) or an
.odt/.ott file (for generating .odt files using a2x).
1. The default asciidoc.odt.styles file is in the from the odt plugin
directory.
2. *.styles "theme" files are installed from theme plugin directories.
3. An odt/ott template document which is specified explicitly with the
a2x-backend.py --base_doc=path command option.
More or less correct.
My guess is that very few users will want to deal with .fodt files directly,
preferring .odt files instead i.e. a2x will be used in preference to
asciidoc.
Correct, but it makes no sense to distribute themes as ODT files IMO. And
the most important reason for not doing styles as an ODT is that it sucks
to develop themes together with improving the backend.
So in my opinion, people can use ODF and ODT files including them on the
commandline, but asciidoc --theme falls back to XML stylesheets so that
they work for both flat XML ODF files as well as packaged ODF files.
And a2x falls back to ODF/ODT files, but can use XML stylesheets too.
Taking up Lex's point, I think the vast majority of users would want to style
with ott templates and not .styles files. The ability to style using
interactively generated ott files was the raison d'être for an ODF backend in
the first place.
Sure, but they will open and save modified files, and as such these are
not distributed themes. Any professional styler will prefer XML files over
packaged ODT files.
So why complicate things with .styles themes plugins? Instead ship any
built-in .styles files with the odt plugin and make an asciidoc '-a
odf-styles=path' attribute available for those users who want to use their
own .styles files.
Because at this point in time, working with ODT files does not work, will
not help get people involved and makes it a lot harder to style _and_
asciidoc cannot work with ODT files natively, it never will.
(Modifying styles in LibreOffice rewrites the whole file, moves stuff
around, adds stuff that's not needed, etc... While it's should work fine
for simple stuff, for professional use, eg. themes, this is not a proper
solution. You cannot track changes, and not only because it is inside a
ZIP file)
So it's very very simple:
asciidoc --theme <name> uses XML styles, <name>.odt.styles
a2x --theme <name> uses XML styles, <name>.odt.styles
a2x --style-doc <file.odt> uses ODT/OTT styles, <file.odt>
Apart from that we need to learn a2x to create its own ODT files from
scratch (we know now what is needed) and to merge it with an existing
ODT/OTT (has issues now too).
Kind regards,
--
-- dag wieers, [email protected], http://dag.wieers.com/
-- dagit linux solutions, [email protected], http://dagit.net/
[Any errors in spelling, tact or fact are transmission errors]
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