Jallan wrote:
Robin Laing wrote:
Jallan wrote:
Robin Laing wrote:
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.
How does Writer know that I want this paragraph to be a hanging indent
and that text to be subscript? Something is telling it that this
needs to be done to be displayed at that point.
I have never looked at the content.xml before but taking a look at a
simple sample of the content.xml, I see that there are xml control
codes within the document.
For underline, there is
<text:span text:style-name="T1">s a</text:span>
For bold.
<text:span text:style-name="T2">different</text:span>
For hanging indent.
<text:p text:style-name="Hanging_20_indent">{a bunch of
text}<text:p text:style-name="Hanging_20_indent"/>
This looks like an expanded version of reveal codes to me. The
problem is T1 and T2 don't mean anything and are not listed in the
styles menus. I do see that T1 - T5 are defined at the beginning of
the content.xml file.
In the content.xml, things look pretty linear to me.
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.
I guess I like the idea of just looking at my text an knowing what is
happening and where it changes. In a test I ran on Friday, I somehow
changed the format of a piece of text and I couldn't get it to change
back. No matter what I did, it wouldn't change back. Even trying to
over type it was no good.
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
With the debugging tools, it would be nice to know how a cell in a
table converts all the text to vertical on an imported document and
how to get that format to be changed. None of the settings I could
find in any of the menu would change the contents to normal. Nothing
at all. It was as if the cell was only allowing text to be one
character wide. With RC, I could have deleted the offending codes
directly and cleared up the problem.
--
Robin Laing
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
