https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=90068
--- Comment #9 from Christopher R Lee <[email protected]> --- Thank you for all the interesting comments and proposals. There appears to be some conceptual difficulty with the technical categorisation of font variants as character styles; this may have something to do with the fact that wysiwyg word processors (apart from the old WordPerfect) don't let the user see how markup is applied. I've proposed elsewhere that the necessary information could be supplied by means of subtle lightly-coloured background patterns. Perhaps we could go back to the beginning by defining likely user requirements, perhaps with ideas on what users might be encouraged to require in a World uninfluenced by certain other word processors. On that subject, I was amused by the first version of Word (2007) that had the Dreadful Ribbon: they forgot to include subscript and superscript, and provided no suitable way for the user to add them. My basic user requirement for Writer would be to be able to display all available font variants (you could include size and colour) by clicking on something. Frequently-used variants like italic and subscript could continue to have their own buttons or other means of access, but there is no reason to give them a special technical status. I'm sure that people using Writer without special guidance or training will want to continue to use direct formatting, which gives the font variant and not the intent. There is no objection to having intent as a category of character styles with funny or incomprehensible names, but these are probably of use mainly to those of us who use(d) templates written by experts in an enterprise setting. I think we need two separate categories of character styles. The design of export filters might be simplified if direct formatting were to be interpreted in terms of styles. For many users, the individual direct formatting buttons are OK for the 4 or 5 common variants, but there is no logical reason, except lack of toolbar space, to treat differently small caps (for example). Presently, to get small caps you have to go to Format/Character or else make your own character style. Either way, the user is presented with a complete style definition, which may be why contributors to this thread don't count 'italic' and so on as styles. A difficulty is that most often the user doesn't want anything to be changed except the font variant. This reveals what seems to me a fundamental weakness of Writer: character styles have a font size defined; I don't know where that cascades down from because the styles supplied (Version 4.4.3.2) are inherited from 'none'. The character style 'Rubies' (whatever that is supposed to signify) has a font size of 6 *points*. An everyday practice with word processors is to change the font size of a selection or the whole document, perhaps to fit the page, or perhaps for a reader with poor eyesight. Changing a selection using 'Format/Character' changes all characters to the new font size, and consequently it's difficult to re-locate the original character style. Changing the default paragraph style from 12 to 20 pt leaves the poor little Rubies at 6 pt and your friend can't read them. Writer is supposed to be used with a computer, so it ought to be possible to convert (transparently to the user) direct formatting to some kind of style, and to define a style structure whereby styles can be set up to modify only the parameter the user wants to change. Clearly, font sizes in styles need to be proportional and not absolute, with rounding if necessary. -- You are receiving this mail because: You are the assignee for the bug.
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