Jallan wrote:
Robin Laing wrote:
If you do allot of importing, cutting and general work with different
formats of documents, the issue of strange effects are common. That
stray token or formatting that was part of the original document is
now inserted inside your nicely stylized document causing a problem.
But where is that snipit of code?
You are still lost in how WordPerfect does things.
WP uses a code at each location to represent the change that is being
applied. This code represents one single property change. There is a
close code at the end of the selection. On importing and exporting,
cutting and pasting, these codes can get jumbled over time. I have
seen it and experienced it.
Since OOo Writer and MS Word don't use code tokens, there cannot be
snipits of codes or stray tokens to cause problems. "But where is that
snipit of code?" is a meaningless question, like asking where the horse
is in an automobile.
But a style could be changed over a single character. A single
character could be a space. A person doing the edit may not know or
see this space as has happened to me. Even in WordPerfect.
The WordPerfect complexity of menus and shortcut keys that produce
formatting codes that in turn produce the actual formatting doesn't
exist in OOo Writer or in MS Word.
No, there are just a bunch of styles menus with a bunch of styles that
have other problems. Both have their own complexity. As one person
said, they have over 2000 styles.
The values you insert through menus and shortcut keys in OOo Writer and
in MS Word are applied *directly* to the various objects: page objects,
paragraph objects, table objects, table cell objects, text range objects
and so forth. Nothing can be "stray", though it can certainly not be
what you want.
Think simple.
Jallan
I always try to think simple. To me reveal codes is simple. Styles
are complex because a style can do allot at once. Change
capitalization, background, add borders, plus how much more. This is
one click that can totally confuse or lose someone that doesn't expect
it to happen especially if you come from a domain of setting each
attribute if you want to change them. If you know what the style
will do, this can be great. What happens if there is a character
style that is within this paragraph? (At least OOo does a better job
of undoing these changes than MS Word from a convert.)
But that is what I do understand. This is why I suggest a single box
that displays each of these without having to click through multiple
windows.
I know that if I change the format of a word, the style in the XML
code is different than the word before and the word after. The XML
has a pointer to the description. I don't know XML but I am learning.
To me there is an indication that the formatting changes.
Now what happens if there is a format change that covers a character
which is a space? You have one character space that may be enough to
change a format within the rest of the document. I regularly import
documents that have some weird and wonderful things happen in strange
places.
I don't deny that styles are useful and maybe if I can learn them
inside and out I will even grow to like them but in my case, I don't
want 2000+ styles to have to remember and use. I want a tool that
allows me to find out how OOo imported the document. What styles and
type of styles were used. What ones were used on importing this
particular piece of text. Was it a paragraph style that is causing
this affect or a character style? I want the ability to go through a
60 page document with my keyboard and see in a quick dialog where and
what style changed. This is what lead me to my suggestion.
How about a document on Styles for WordPerfect users?
---
This is informative.
I will read about this in three days when I get back to work.
--
Robin Laing
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