Sak wrote:
I discovered something else that may be related to the styles template.
I'm not sure if this is also related to the list styles issue, but if
you apply the template to a document it causes the references in the
Table of Contents to go away.
At first I wasn't sure what was happening while I was working on Chapter
2 of the Writer Guide. I thought the Table of Contents for just that
chapter was busted somehow (i.e. if you download the current "visible"
version the ToC functionality is goofy: no Ctrl+click). Today, though,
I discovered that the ToC was also broken in the template test to
Chapter 1 that I recently uploaded to the Feedback folder. Looking back
at Jean's version, the ToC is fine, but not in mine. I then tested it
against Chapter 3. Downloading from the site, the ToC is fine (you can
Ctrl+click on a listing in the ToC and it'll take you there; you can
right click and select Edit, and nothing bad happens). However, if you
apply the template the appearance of the ToC doesn't change, but the
functionality fails (no more Ctrl+click, and if you try to right-click
and select Edit the entire ToC will go away).
That is caused by the settings in Tools > Outline Numbering
disappearing. (This problem can be caused by a variety of
circumstances; I don't know which applies in this case.) If you fix
the outline numbering, you'll find that the ToC starts working again.
Usually it stays working after it's fixed... but not always. This may
or may not be a template problem, or it may be related to some bug in OOo.
I'm not sure what the problem is with Chapter 2 specifically, but there
are a lot of broken references in it. The *20080715 version comes with
a bad ToC, among other bad references throughout.
I'm not sure what's causing the bad references, but I've seen it
before in various chapters over several OOo versions. It seems to be
related in some way with "upgrading" a chapter from one version of OOo
(2.x) to another (3.0 beta), but it doesn't happen to all of them.
Usually, deleting the bad refs and re-inserting them fixes the problem
(they open okay after saving), but not always.
I've been held up a
little on my review of Chapter 2, trying to understand what's going on
with it, but I've resigned to just focus more on the content at this
point. Formatting for Chapter 2 of the WG may need some special kind of
love to get it right again.
And/or some of these problems may not settle down until both OOo and
the template are more stable. My view: just concentrate on the content
at this point, as you've suggested.
Aside: I think we have heaps more x-refs in our docs than are needed.
Most x-refs point to a figure, in situations where it should be
obvious which figure is being referred to; why do we need an x-ref to
it? I'm inclined to cut most of them out... but I noticed that a few
people had been adding even more of them in the last update of the
books. I realise there is a difference of opinion on this subject
(with good arguments on both sides), but given that we've had
intermittent problems with goofy x-refs for years, minimising them
seems to me to be the most practical thing to do.
--Jean
