Robin Laing wrote:
Jallan wrote:
Robin Laing wrote:
If want to change the "Default" style, just select modify in the
Stylelist for the "Default" character style, and then change the
"Default" style and all the paragraphs in the "Default" style will
change, except ... and this is important, when you have applied direct
formatting on top of the underlying styles.
What else. You don't want special effects like bolding and italics or
font changes *within* a paragraph to vanish because you have changed
the underlying font. To put it in Word Perfect terms, when you change
a paragraph style the paragraph display as though you inserted a bunch
new codes at the beginning of each paragraph in place of the old ones,
but any following control codes within that paragraph are left alone.
Accordingly what you see may be far more determined by these following
codes.
I still have to find the font and spacing issue that was changed in a
style but after setting the default style, the font issue is still
present. But what I did confirm that one of may major issues with
importing documents has been related to a style that the default
style doesn't fix.
Possibly this is overlying direct formatting or an overlying character
style. If you set the Stylelist to show character styles, then the
character style at the current cursor position will be highlighted in
the list. You can then edit that style. If the style doesn't change in
the list when visually you see a change within a paragraph, such as a
font change or a change from non-bold to bold, then direct formatting
has been applied.
To see the underlying paragraph formatting in a paragraph just do
CTRL-SHIFT-SPACE to remove all but the basic paragraph style
formatting in that paragraph. After you've seen what this shows, you
can press CTRL-Z to put the character style formatting and direct
formatting back again.
Jallan
Your long description is a good example to me on why Reveal codes is
better.
Look here or if that isn't it, look there. I guess this is why I feel
reveal codes is nicer. A single keystroke and all my codes are
displayed. No opening this tool box or changing this setting and
opening that dialog.
This thread has indicated that better OOo would be improved with better
debugging tools. There is no argument there.
But reveal codes isn't particularly suitable, for either MS Word or OOo
Writer, when both use practically no internal code tokens. Both these
word processors work hierarchically rather than by manipulation of a
single-level text stream.
Again, there are no codes to reveal. Attempting to understand OOo Writer
(or MS Word) in that way is something like attempting to understand
the behavior of cat from what you know about dogs.
I've used WordPerfect, years ago, and have used and still use, directly,
data formats that page stream based. My work involves working directly
with Postscript files and I have coded directly in both Postscript and
PCL. So I'm quite familiar with how to use and debug text stream formats
and their difficulties, as well as the very different abilities and
difficulties you get with hierarchical text structures.
And like 99% of those with experience in both, for most purpose I'll go
with the hierarchical structure, because it *is* easier.
I recall a secretary some years back who insisted on hard coding her
headers and footers in the text rather than using MS Word's facility,
and manually moving them the same time, because (so she believed,
probably without trying it) using Word's own header and footer facility
was too complicated and she had no time to learn it.
I will learn styles when I can but it took me minutes to learn how to
use reveal codes. Styles are not that easy.
Really. I first learned about styles on text processing programs years
ago in a Desktop publishing program on the Amiga. It took me minutes to
learn. Just set up text attributes in a style in *exactly* the same way
I would set them up in word processor I was familiar with, and then
apply the style by selecting and clicking. There was really nothing to
learn. I also first learned TeX on the Amiga.
I cannot imagine what you find difficult in this. There must be some
lack of understanding or misconception or misunderstanding that is
confusing you.
BTW, thanks for the description on how the coding works in OOo. I wish
there was something to make it easier to find these errors as it is my
major headache as I have to import and convert many documents to ODF and
they have to look the same as the MS or WP version's of the document.
Ouch! "Exactly the same" is sometimes an impossibility. And if the
documents you are converting are as messy and unstructured in the way
they are coded as many that I deal with ... you do end up ignoring the
right way to do things ... just use any hack to get things *looking*
close enough that it's almost impossible to tell the difference.
Importing a document or series of documents is not perfect, no matter
what program you use. I have had these issues with all of the Word
processors I have used. I just found WP the was the quickest to clean
the coding problems that occurred.
Yes ... it would be, if you are very familiar with it and with general
low level text stream coding, even if it is only within WordPerfect.
Unfortunately compared to MS Word, I've found OOo Writer very buggy if I
tried to use style-free direct format approach.
I think you are really going to have to take the time to get past
whatever is confusing you about styles and try to understand how OOo
Write really sees things, as a linked series of paragraph objects with
styles and direct formatting applied to them. MS Word also sees things
the same way ... but has few or no problems when users avoid styles
altogether.
Jallan
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
