Robin Laing wrote:
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.
Ah, jeez... Robin. I started a couple of times now to figure out how to
explain this so it makes sense to you. The problem is that you have a
particular picture in your head of how this works. This picture you have
is very sensible and logical and completely correct--for
Wordperfect--but completely wrong for Writer or Word. These programs are
built from completely different design concepts.
One consequence of this is that the relationship between Styles and
direct formatting is completely opposite in the two paradigms.
Direct formatting with Wordperfect-style tokens is like typing with the
Shift key. You're typing along and then you hit the Caps-lock key and
that tells the machine to create upper-case letters until you release
the Caps-lock and then you are creating lower-case letters again.
On the other hand, Styles are like a control panel full of buttons,
knobs, and switches and a particular style is just a snapshot of the
position of all those controls. Every paragraph has a style associated
with it and that style completely describes the formatting for that
paragraph. Similarly, every character has a style as well. Normally that
style is an inherited subset of the paragraph style, but you can
override that inherited style if you wish; that's why both paragraph and
character styles have settings for Fonts and such.
So a Wordperfect style is like a macro--a shortcut--that tells the
program to apply a particular sequence of tokens.
On the other hand, direct formatting in Writer actually creates a new
Style on the fly that consists of the underlying base style as modified
by the direct formatting commands.
So Wordperfect *simulates* Writer/Word styles, and Writer *simulates*
direct formatting. The "T1" and "T2" you saw in content.xml are just
automatically generated styles from direct formatting.
One big consequence of these differences is that the "state" of a
particular piece of text in Wordperfect is a cumulative sort of thing;
it's the result of the accumulated effects of all the tokens that
precede it.
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.
I can't speak to your particular issue, but I have encountered similar
problems in the past, which only proves that OOo isn't perfect. Nothing is.
--
Rod
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