Michele,
Thanks for all the hard work. If you don't mind a small suggestion,
would you consider using some descriptive names for the OONumbering?
OONumberingArab, OONmberingRoman, OONumberingAlpha, maybe? Or, how
about OONum123, OONumIII, OONumABC? Something like that would be much
easier for the user to select, and it lets the names with numbers in
them refer to nesting levels. /tj
Michele wrote:
Hello,
I had another thought about list styles and I am planning a major
change which I would like to explain here. The trigger was chapter 11
(mail merge) of the Writer guide which contains many nested lists.
Numbered lists
----------------------
at present we have only one list style (OOoNumbering) which uses three
different numbering schemes:
level 1: Arabic number (right aligned)
level 2: small case letters (left aligned)
level 3: Roman number (left aligned)
We also have three paragraph styles families OOoNumbered 1,
OOoNumbered 2 and OOoNumbered 3.
In theory we should then use
OOoNumbered 1 for the first level of the list,
OOoNumbered 2 for the second level of the list
OOoNumbered 3 for the third level of the list.
However, since the underlying list style is the same, we do not need
three paragraph styles (in fact I never needed to use OOoNumbered 2
even for nested lists) and it is not possible, for example to create a
numbered list where the first level is, say letters and the second
level arabic numbers.
So my proposal is to define three *list* styles:
OOoNumbering 1 (all levels use Arabic numbering)
OOoNumbering 2 (all levels use small case letters)
OOoNumbering 3 (all levels use Roman numbers)
Once this is done, the paragraph styles will be changed so that:
OOoNumbered 1 (start, cont., end) are associated with OOoNumbering 1
OOoNumbered 2 (start, cont., end) are associated with OOoNumbering 2
OOoNumbered 3 (start, cont., end) are associated with OOoNumbering 3
In practical terms this means that when I want a certain numbering
type (arabic, letter, roman) I only need to to apply the corresponding
OOoNumbered paragraph style, then adjust the level as appropriate.
Bullet lists
---------------
Along the same lines, my proposal is to define
OOoBullet 1 (using round markers)
OOoBullet 2 (using dash markers)
And create a new family of paragraph styles OOoList 2 (start, cont.,
end) associated with OOoBullet 2
This allows, for example, to have round markers as level 2 (at present
as soon as you demote a bullet list to level 2 the marker
automatically becomes a dash.
I could not get my hands on the ODF specifications, but I am almost
sure that this is how lists are meant to work.
Cheers,
Michele
