The TL;DR: OpenOffice and the OpenDocument Format *only* have styles and the styles work in hierarchies where style features are inherited and operate over different hierarchy classes of styles as well. So-called "local formatting" is accomplished by imposing styles.
- Dennis BACKGROUND When you set one of the formatting buttons on a selection of one or more characters, a style will be applied at least on a text-span element that is introduced for enacting the style dependency. Individual characters don't have format or styles directly. Those are inherited from some sort of (nested) text container that the characters are within. What happens in this case is that OpenOffice makes up an "automatic" style to reflect the settings being imposed, and that will usually inherit from some sort of built-in or default style, and it may intersect with styles on a higher container, such as character-format styles set on the paragraph. That is how it is difficult to have something like WordPerfect's "Show" or "Reveal" functionality work with ODF-based documents. It is also a source of problems when later you attempt to reverse some aspect of what was set (e.g., a font choice) and it doesn't seem to work because of some sort of style collision that is not apparent. FOR USERS It is possible to remain ignorant of styles in working with OpenOffice Writer, so long as one is doing simple things. OpenOffice is designed to permit that, partly to make it easier to deal with Microsoft Office documents, at least superficially. At some point, it may be necessary to understand more about styles, especially when working with documents being worked on collaboratively with others. There are templates to consider and the styles that go with the format being preserved as part of the collaborative work. On the other hand, for individual effort, I have no desire to tell someone that they should change their way of working, unless they are trying to force something in a way that actually can't work in OpenOffice. The idea is to not have the product be in the way of the user. At the same time, not all naïve attempts will succeed. I think it is best, in that case, to offer the user something that is the least that can possibly work in their situation without imposing any more learning-curve on them than necessary to match their ambitions for their documents. - Dennis -----Original Message----- From: Brian Barker [mailto:b.m.bar...@btinternet.com] Sent: Friday, June 26, 2015 09:26 To: users@openoffice.apache.org Subject: Re: Use of styles [was: Editor Wars!] At 11:26 26/06/2015 -0400, Dan Lewis wrote: >One thing that I *do not* do is use the styles list across the top >of Apache OO. (*B*,/I, /_U_) I know that you know what you mean, but you will confuse the masses by saying this. Bold, italic, and underline can indeed be aspects of both character styles and paragraph styles. But the buttons in the Formatting toolbar (along with keyboard shortcuts Ctrl+B and so on, as well as right-click | Style > and Format | Character...) apply local character formatting and are not related to styles. So it may be confusing to call the array of buttons a "styles list". [ ... ] --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscr...@openoffice.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: users-h...@openoffice.apache.org
