Jonathon Coombes wrote:
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.
Styles work better in OOo than Office. This is what I hear from those
that have used both. I don't argue that. I still say OOo is more of
a clone than WordPerfect ever was though. OOo has gotten better than
Office.
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.
The problem with WYSIWYG displays is you see a problem and try to fix
the formatting by changing or redoing the style but it doesn't work.
Or as I have come across before, you change a style that is only
supposed to affect a paragraph but affects a whole document after the
edit point because of how the document was put together. This is
where reveal codes shine. I have had issues where I wanted to do
something but I could not get the cursor in the exact location to
achieve what I wanted. This would have been easy with reveal codes.
FWIW, I only used WP after they were a WYSIWYG display. I never used
a text only version.
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 :)
I like styles for what I know but for me, I am in the previous group
of allot of one-time items where styles are not that time saving. I
need quick formatting that isn't always achievable via styles.
If there was WordPerfect for Linux again, I would be purchasing it.
If StarOffice provided Reveal Codes, I would purchase it. Reveal
codes to me is worth money.
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