Saturday, October 29, 2005 Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> Le samedi 29 octobre 2005 à 12:41 +0200, Giuseppe Bilotta a écrit :
>> An obvious remark is that text in a foreign language is in
>> that foreign language, full stop. It's highly dubious that
>> you could have second thoughts ("hm, maybe this isn't
>> Russian, maybe this is Japanese") and have such second
>> thoughts consistently across all occurrences of that
>> language.
> Which means hard formatting like done with the macro is the right thing
> to do in the langage case
Rather, tha macro can do the job fine for most common
purposes.
>> *However*, taking your example ("different font
>> for Swedish text") is exactly the reason why it should
>> nevertheless be part of an appropriate style, and not be
>> applied manually (or macroly): if halfway through a document
>> to decide, or otherwise need, to set all the foreign text
>> in a different font (or with a different font property,
>> typically in italic), you can of course change the macro,
>> which will work for all the *future* text, but it won't
>> change all the text you already typed in. This is *exactly*
>> what styles were made for.
> This is an argument for putting language conditionals in styles, not
> making styles set language like nowadays. I understand what you'd like
> OO.o to do but langage management is not a valid argument. Free style
> mixing (with attributes that really belong in styles) is a valid
> argument.
As I mentioned in one of the parts of my mail that you
snipped, I have nothing against language selection in style.
Why? Because language is a property of the text. True, it's
not a property with an immediate visual feedback, but it can
influence typesetting (by e.g. changing the hyphenation
points and thus the overall formatting of the paragraph).
I am not sure what you mean by language conditionals, OTOH.
Something like: "if the language is Italian, format this
way, if the language is not format this other way"? If this
is it, the idea doesn't appeal to me very much, honestly.
> With free cascading styles you'd have a better workaround for languages
> than now, since you'd be able to short-circuit the macro step but it
> would still be a workaround. Just consider what happens if someone
> changes the language in your style instead of just changing the
> formatting attributes -> instant content loss
Why would someone change the language in any of my styles?
I *do* have a gripe about the Style Editor in OOo, in that
it is not easy to say 'this property should be the default'
once you have set it to something else. Example: in a style,
I set the font to Times New Roman, 14pt. Latern on, I
realize that the font face shouldn't be influenced, so it
should rather be "default font, at 14 pt". And so on and so
forth.
You can *see*, on the first page of the style editor, which
properties are set by the style, but you cannot say "oopsie,
this one shouldn't be hard-set, it should be inherited by
the style this one is linked from!"
This is why I submitted, a LONG time ago, the enhancement
request #7861, http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=7861
It would be nice if it got more attention.
However, this is not strictly relevant to the discussion,
I'm afraid we may be heading somewhat Off Topic.
BTW, is anybody going to submit a request for cascading
character styles, or should I do it?
--
Giuseppe "Oblomov" Bilotta
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