Am 29.04.2015 um 18:53 schrieb Dennis E. Hamilton:
-- commenting inline to --
From: Peter Kelly [mailto:pmke...@apache.org]
Sent: Sunday, April 26, 2015 21:56
To: dev@corinthia.incubator.apache.org
Subject: Re: Git revert difficulty
On 27 Apr 2015, at 11:27 am, Franz de Copenhague <fr...@apache.org> wrote:
I have a question regarding to the ODFTextConverter to HTML. ODF only use span tags and style names
to define text content and formats like bold, italic, strike, etc as opposite to OOXML that uses
run texts tags with separate rPr tags for inline formatting like bold, italic, strike, etc. For me
makes sense how DOCXConverter converts text formatting inline style like style="font-weight:
bold" or style="font-style: italic".
So, considering that ODF only uses style names. What is your text formatting
approach for HTML generation from ODF documents?
Excellent question :)
[ ... ]
I actually think this is a poor design choice in the spec, because it causes
confusion. As far as I’m concerned, “automatic” styles aren’t styles at all,
because the whole point of styles is that they’re explicitly defined by the
user (or provided as defaults by an application), and are distinct from direct
formatting. However, this is the terminology used in the spec.
When translating to HTML, I think it would be best to translate all automatic
styles to direct formatting.
The naming is indeed indeed non intuitive. The automatic styles are
being created automatically, when a user is applying hard formatting.
For instance, selects some character an applies bold format.
Although I dislike the concept in the beginning as Dennis does, the
design makes a lot of sense for large documents, where often the same
combination of hard styles are being applied. Especially for
spreadsheets it made a lot of sense. In the browser office for
Open-XChange we improved performance for the transfer of change
operation by referring to automatic style sets.
I would like to point three further concepts of styles, which are not
intuitive.
The style from a table cell might have three different background
colours (see
http://docs.oasis-open.org/office/v1.2/os/OpenDocument-v1.2-os-part1.html#property-fo_background-color
).
As a table cell style can hold properties for the cell, paragraph and text.
One could explain it as the cell background color, the next default
background color of the paragraph (within a cell) and finally the one
background-color from the text style (within the paragraph).
The second interesting example of automatic styles. If there is a
paragraph with the text "abc", but only the paragraph has an automatic
style having as single property a text property style
<http://docs.oasis-open.org/office/v1.2/os/OpenDocument-v1.2-os-part1.html#element-style_text-properties>
with a background color.
The user is not selecting the middle character "b" and is removing all
format (or reset to default style) from the b. Only "a" and "c" have a
remaining format.
Guess what happens when the document is being saved.
The automatic paragraph style has been removed and there are two
text:span around "a" and "c" referring to the same automatic text style.
Finally one of my favorite style examples is the cross paragraph text
selection and deletion (of text and inbetween paragraph borders) by the
user.
Assume the first paragraph is a heading with red background part of the
template style and the second an ordinary paragraph with green automatic
background paragraph style.
The result is: The first paragraph style win, but any text styles from
the latter are being applied as span with automatic style to the none
deleted part of the second paragraph.
Just check it out if you have any doubts ;)
[ ... ]
<orcmid>
Yes, the handling of the automatic styles in OO.o-lineage software is a
problem because users can't inspect for and resolve problems with things like
format changes that simply won't go away, since they can't find the span and
changing the paragraph-level style has no effect!
This is an usability problem, and it has not been dealt with properly in the
major ODF implementations.
Concerning "flattening" of the style hierarchy and inheritance down to what
the character stream needs, that is very appropriate. It is also important for comparing
documents (but not so great as an update to an existing document).
Note however that Microsoft Office ODF support is via translation to and
from the Office internal model so this is demonstrably not insurmountable.
</orcmid>
Dennis, I do not fully understand the problem you are explaining in the
previous paragraph.
Is it that we are still using the ancient hard formatting / template
approach and not having embraced CI/CD into the formats?
Greetings,
Svante
