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John Jason Jordan wrote:
<snip>
> I am glad to see you are trying to get your head around styles. Styles
> are the most powerful feature of OOo and you will not get the real
> experience until you get comfortable with them. And the learning effort
> will not be wasted because just about all text editors and layout
> programs these days use styles extensively. For example, if you decide
> to use a layout application like Scribus to design a newsletter or book
> it will import your OOo text and preserve the styles.
The first few pages of Chapter 6 of the OOo Writer Guide do emphasize
the importance of styles, hence my efforts to figure them out. I
started by reading the Writer Guide in order to familiarize myself with
the general structure of OOo, but there was much there that I did not
fully understand. I then started to experiment, referring to the Guide
and OOo help to see if either would be of any help. In most cases it
was, but unfortunately not in all. So my question stem from the fact
that I could not understand the explanation, that the explanation did
not appear anywhere, or if it did I could not or did not find it.
(I sometimes think that applications manuals are written *and edited* by
the people who develop the applications rather that the people who use
them. The OOo Writer Guide is a prime example of one.)
> As for your specific questions, I suspect a few things that you
> may have missed. In the following I am referring only to paragraph
> styles:
Yes I definitely did. I had an exchange of e-mail with a kind
individual who for some reason preferred to contact me off list.
> 1) Styles can be based on other styles. The "default" style is the base
> for many other styles. The advantage is that you can make a change to
> the underlying style and it will cascade through the styles based on
> that style.
Yes I found that out. I also discovered that I can change the default
style for a given document, and that style as changed is saved with that
document. I had assumed that the default default style, so to speak,
would be changed as well. I soon found out that I was incorrect, that
after OOo is first opened but before a specific document is opened, the
default style is as it is set up by OOo, not as I had changed it for a
specific document.
> 2) Part of the attributes of a style are what style to follow it with.
> If you change the "default" style to make the following style "text
> body," then that is what Writer will do as soon as you start the next
> paragraph after a paragraph to which "default" is applied. This can be
> a handy feature if, for example, you want a special style for the first
> paragraph of an article, but a variation of it for the rest of the
> article.
Yes I found that out too, but got lost in a plethora of styles when I
tried to create a series of paragraph and list styles to make a series
of nested headings. I have yet to figure out the best way to make such
nests to meet my needs. I have now doubt that in trying to do so I will
have to ask the list specific questions, but I am not ready yet.
> 3) You cannot remove the "default" style, but you can change it to
> whatever features you want.
See answer to (1) above.
> 4) I use the "default" style only when I want to remove existing
> formatting. That is, I never apply the "default" style deliberately. It
> only gets used when I go to Format > Default Formatting (Ctrl-m).
> Normally I use my own styles.
As I result of that off line e-mail exchange I have decided to do the
same and use unique identifiers for my own styles to distinguish them
from OOo's.
> 5) "Indent" means that the first line of a paragraph is indented. In
> normal typesetting the reader needs a clue that the author has started
> a new paragraph. Traditionally you can do this by adding a bit of space
> between the paragraphs (extra leading), or by indenting. Normally one
> would not do both. And if you choose to indent your paragraphs, do not
> do so for the first paragraph of the article or for the first paragraph
> after a graphic element (picture, table, etc.).
With WP 5.1 the standard way of separating paragraphs was to put a blank
line between them. OOo however does not really allow that. Hitting
"Enter" starts a new paragraph, its style being the paragraph style
indicated in the style before it as the paragraph style to follow it, or
in the absence of such an indication the default paragraph style.
Instead, if a space is wanted between paragraphs, it is done by
specifying a space either above or below the start or end of text in
each paragraph style to be used. ("Shift-Enter" will put a blank line
between two lines of text, but the both the text before and after a
blank line created this way will still be part of the same paragraph, as
OOo understands that word. "Shift-Enter" do doubt has its uses, but not
to provide spaces between paragraphs.)
> A "hanging indent" is a different sort of style. In this case you want
> the first line flush left, but the remaining lines indented. This is
> common when making a list of points. If plain text e-mail could do
> styles I would be writing this with bullet points where the paragraphs
> are indented except for the first line.
Yes, a hanging indent has its special uses as well, but where needed it
should be provided in its own unique style, rather than trying to change
a standard paragraph style used in a given document. Otherwise, the
change will occur is all following invocations of the standard paragraph
style. I found about this feature of OOo the hard way.
> 5) Styles are saved in templates. You can created your own default
> template which will contain whatever styles you want it to have.
Yes, I have started to do so, but not without grief. I had created a
series of styles which I wanted to use as a template. To make the
template I removed the text and thought I was saving the result as a
template. Somehow I updated the document rather than create the
template, thereby losing all the text. So I activated periodic backup
and decided that in making a template from a document I should save
the whole document as a template first and then edit the template.
> I don't know if any of the above resolves any of your confusion. If
> not, give a shout back and we'll try again.
Yes it does. Thanks for your response; I am learning -- really.
Ken Heard
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