On 2013-11-29 14:38, Peter West wrote:
I suspect that at least part of the problem here is that it is sometimes
difficult to see - especially with an inherited document - exactly how
formatting has been applied and consequently how it might be removed.
The problem is that _some_ formatting seems to get "stuck." This is either an
implementation bug or, for some obscure reason, a design decision; which makes it a
design bug.
Named styles are exclusive. Even though a style is _based_ on another style, recursively,
applying a named style overrides the previous named style, whether the old style is an ancestor
of the new style, or a completely different beast. That should be that as far as applying named
styles goes. All that should be left is any "style fragments" that one has applied
from the toolbar: bold, italic, etc; left, centered, etc; a particular font and so on. That may
include bits of format applied through a format>paragraph or format>character menu,
_provided_ that all of this formatting is removed by the 'Clear direct formatting' operation.
_Everything_ else must be reset to the values defined (or defaulted) in the applied style.
This should not be a problem. If you like the look of some styling, create a
new named style from the selection. Then extend and modify as required.
That's what styles are all about.
The other thing is to clearly display the interaction of paragraph and list
styles. The style name display should have the capacity to display ALL the
named styles that are in play, and there should be a display option, similar to
the 'Display special characters' button, to toggle 'Show direct formatting.'
It all boils down to being able to determine the source of any formatting, and
being able, easily, to reset all formatting to a named style or set of
complementary style types; paragraph, character, list.
And yes, your discussion does help.
Peter West
Yes, this discussion makes sense to me also, I would also like to be
able to see the style outline and be able to see and swap styles from
the outline view rather than click in every paragraph to see what style
is applied. Although I can't think of one, there must be some inherent
reason LO works like this, possibly so it can accommodate the jumble of
non-styled documents from competing product imports.
Steve
...he saw a poor widow put in two copper coins.
On 29 Nov 2013, at 4:44 am, Brian Barker <[email protected]> wrote:
I still don't understand why you consider any of this a difficulty. If you
have a mixture of direct formatting along with character and paragraph styles,
you may well wish to remove some parts of it, but not all. So it's useful to
have more than one facility. Surely you would expect to need to remove the
different parts of applied formatting separately - and delight that you were
able to do so selectively.
As far as I can see:
o Format | Default Formatting removes both direct formatting (to characters or
paragraphs) and formatting by character styles.
o The Apply Style drop-down applies paragraph styles, so you'd expect "Clear
formatting" there to reset the paragraph style to Default - and it does. But it
also does the same as Format | Default Formatting as well.
I suspect that at least part of the problem here is that it is sometimes
difficult to see - especially with an inherited document - exactly how
formatting has been applied and consequently how it might be removed.
I trust this helps.
Brian Barker
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