Michele wrote:
Hello Gary.
As threatened earlier, I finally modified the chapter template so that
the Note/Tip/Caution tables won't break across pages any longer. [Its
breaking only rarely happens anyway, but it was an unnecessary nuisance
and potential time bomb.]
Also the text in the second column is automatically now set to be
vertically aligned, so that if the text was only one line deep, it
wouldn't appear so goofy as it would be when it was when it was top aligned.
OOoTextBody had its text flow set for 2/2 widow/orphan control instead
of having the entire paragraph on a page w/o breaking. This may cut down
the page count a bit.
I guess what could really help having more compact guides is to adopt a
different policy on figures as Jean has occasionally done. The major problem
with this is that every revision is likely to require readjusting of all the
pagination.
There are other formatting considerations possible for the OOoTextBody
style, namely whether we want ragged right edge or have justified
alignment instead. Or, there could be two different templates for each
of the two cases. This is a personal choice, so I, as an editor, does
whatever the stakeholder desires.
In the doctoral dissertations I do for some Koreans, typically at the UT
at Austin, they either prefer justified alignment themselves or the
University of Texas prefers it and includes that in their own doctoral
dissertation templates. Anyway, this is a formatting style consideration
that should be considered one way or the other or both.
I have not revised the template in detail, but I noticed that you did not
include the user input character style (blue italic? neither the strong
emphasis in red/purple).
This is a good time to set up character styles and their parameters for
these. We could employ bold italic character styles for both black and
color(s). The template uploaded today was essentially the older
vanilla-flavored template. The other styles were added into a number of
chapters while they were edited. They had no identity on any OOoAuthors
template previously.
ToDo list: Set up paragraph and list styles for the bulleted and
numbered lists so that those (nested, even) lists won't require any
manual overrides for formatting indents, vertical spacing, etc.
I am ok with using paragraph styles rather than list styles, but probably it
is too much. I would prefer to add another couple of list styles for nested
lists (bullet followed by numbers and numbers followed by bullets). I do not
recall nested lists more than 2 levels deep.
My personal list style sets are based upon the List x and Numbering x
preset OOo style names, but with my modified settings. I have previously
used 18pt indentations and go three levels deep. That's generally good
enough for all applications. The style names for each level would then
be: List x Start (first list item), List x End (final list item), List x
cont. (if needed for middle terms), List x (for body text w/o bullet).
The numbered lists would follow a similar pattern using the Numbering x
xyz style names.
Motorola/Freescale Semiconductor/Metrowerks used a similar scheme for
FrameMaker tags for their CodeWarrior embedded-microcontroller
engineering and user-guide docs. Although, they have a ton of
specialized FrameMaker tags--far in excess of what we have. A tag is the
FrameMaker name for what MS or OOo refers to a style.
Gary
--
Gary Schnabl
2775 Honorah
Detroit MI 48209
(734) 245-3324
