On 31/01/2006, at 12:02 PM, Keith Bates wrote:
On Mon, 30 Jan 2006 14:45:37 -0700
Robin Laing <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
David Clark wrote:
Most important question -- Where is Reveal Codes????
Now remember that OOo is a MS Office replacement and thus follows
their techniques closely.
That's actually not true! OO does things quite differently from MS in
many ways, although I believe the user-interface is pretty similar.
Application of styles is one of those things that OO actually does
much
better, I'm told.
Agreed. OOo was not designed to follow MS Office's techniques at all.
Due to community (read - new users) pressure, the developers have
swayed to adding or changing features to more like MS Office.
Yes, the styles are handled more cleanly and more scalable in OOo.
Take for example the page styles. This adds a huge amount of flexibility
in the document layout that is much harder in MS Office and other
programs.
Many on this list have never experienced the freedom of Reveal Codes
so they don't understand the joy and ease of fixing formatting
problems in two or three seconds instead of trying to edit a style to
get the effect you want.
Of course, once you get the Styles created and configured the way you
like, they are very powerful formatting tools. Much more powerful
and controllable than the Microsoft versions.
Good luck and I hope that the lack of Reveal Codes doesn't turn you
away.
Reveal codes and styles are useful in two very different circumstances
(and I've actually used both).
Yes, reveal codes were great when when we used monitors that came
in green/black colours. When we had serial printers and teletypes that
received 'reveal codes' to set the type of printing style needed.
Styles have replaced this method as we now have WYSIWIG graphics.
That is, if it is bold, you will SEE that it is bold.
For short or fairly simple documents such as letters, news letters
etc.
the "on the fly" formatting of pressing Ctl-B for bold and then having
the text qualities visible with "reveal codes" can be reasonably
helpful... although I've lived without the feature quite happily for
several years now since I switched from Windows to Linux.
I am still not sure how helpful they actually are here? What is the
difference between seeing something like "<b>This is bold</b>"
and viewing the word in bold text?
On the other hand, if you regularly create reasonably complex
documents, the ability to set out different headings, text formats
into
a style is huge. Want italics or bold for every level 2 heading? Just
edit the style and it's done.
Certainly styles are much easier in this situation.
It should be noted also that styles are not limited to the word
processor
market here. The Internet uses cascading style sheets (CSS) as the
appropriate method for creating changes to the visual output of text,
graphics, tables etc.
The only justification for reveal codes that I can see is when you
expect something to happen that doesn't (such as underlining a section
of text, and it does more or less than you want). I've found in those
cases that highlighting the section then pressing, say the underline
button, a few times to cancel out whatever the previous state was then
apply the state I want usually does the job.
I would say an even simpler solution would be that if you seem to have a
different format to what you want - simply select "Format > Default
Formatting"
and reset anything on it and re-apply your style (or format if you
have too :)
Regards
Jonathon
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