Robin Laing wrote:
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.
I quite believe that. But all that is left in OOo Writer is the results
of that misinterpretation, not the codes, which you therefore need not
worry about in fixing the problem. If there are no codes to be jumbled,
no-one can jumble them.
A lot of the problems that reveal codes aids with are problems that
can't occur in the first place if the system doesn't use formatting
codes internally.
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.
I'm not clear to me what you are referring to.
No character attribute in OOo Writer or in Word Perfect can be changed
within a character. A character, space included, cannot be half italic
and half-non italic.
Space is a character with special properties, but it is still a character.
But I certainly have encountered spaces with unintended formatting
because one can't so easily see the formatting of naturally invisible
characters. Mostly it doesn't matter much, whether, for example, the
spaces surrounding the only bolded word in a sentence are themselves
bolded or not bolded or whether one of these spaces is bolded and the
other is not. But it's annoying when a client expects us to produce
exact formatting of a complex Quark Express document and we discover
that some of the line wrapping and spacing depends on the exact width of
space characters in a font that we do not have, space characters left
over from whatever document the creator originally used as a basis for
the document we have to deal with.
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.
Word Perfect supports styles. So does XML code and LaTeX code and so forth.
The issue of using or not using styles has no relation to whether or not
a text processing system or text display system uses code tokens
internally to delimit changes of formatting attributes.
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.
If you want a particular level of headings to be in a particular font,
to have a particular font size, to be in a particular color, and to have
a particular indentation, is it more complicated do it once and apply
this *single* style again and again and again, or apply *each* of the
attributes *separately* again, and again, and again?
Which will have the greatest possibility of user error? Which will be
more difficult to fix if an error has occurred?
Using a style abstracts the complexity by putting it all in one place,
in the style definition.
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.)
What happens if a single attribute, such as italics, is applied to a
range of text within a paragraph? I don't see what you are getting at.
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.
A dialog box with *all* formatting attributes supported by OOo Writer
would be too large and cumbersome for most uses. Could you really fit
all possible attribute that apply at a cursor position in a single
dialog box? I suggested a scrolling list perhaps, for odd cases where
this might help.
But mostly it would not help. When looking at character attributes, it
is very, very rare that a user also wants to look at page attributes
such as page size or margin settings, or wants to look at paragraph
spacing attributes.
Word Perfect's reveal code mode certainly doesn't do anything like this.
You have to go hunting for codes that set page margins and so forth,one
of the disadvantages of the formatting code model. While we need
formatting tags in markup language which is essentially one dimensional,
with a two dimensional jumps when styles are concerned, the internal
text structure within a text processing system can be multi-dimensional,
and text attributes can run on a separate level parallel to the text itself.
A could mark important passages in a book by drawing in various kinds of
brackets around those passages, with is comparable to the Word Perfect
method of marking runs of text for a particular purpose. Or the user can
apply different highlighting with markers directly over the text, which
corresponds to the way that OOo Writer and MS Word do it.
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.
I'm not clear on your point.
Formatting changes in space, between any two characters which have any
different formatting attributes, between any two paragraphs that have
any different paragraph attributes, between any two pages that have any
different page attributes.
Formatting changes in time when you change any of these attributes for a
range of text from what they were previously
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.
A space is just a character like any other. If you apply bolding to a
word, you can chose to also apply it to the space before the word, the
space after the word, or to both, or to neither. The XML will show what
you have done.
If you bold a space character by itself, it will have no effect on
anything in the rest of the document. Similarly if you set a space
character to use a particular complex style, that will have no more
effect on anything outside that space character than setting a single
letter "a" to that same complex style.
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.
Most people don't. They just create them on the fly. It takes no longer
to create multiple-effect formatting in a style then it does doing
outside a style, but doing it outside a style means if you want that
same group of effects again, you are going to have to recreate that
bundle of effects again and again and again and again.
(Of course, you can also use the formatting broom icon on the standard
toolbar to pick up such a combination of attributes and apply it
elsewhere, which is a way of applying a complex bundle of formatting
attributes without defining them in a style and without having to
manually enter them again and again. However you lose the advantage of
being able to change the bundle throughout the document all at once.)
I want a tool that allows me to
find out how OOo imported the document. What styles and type of styles
were used.
Press F11. For each different kind of styles in the Stylist you can set
the list box at the bottom of the list to "Applied styles". Only styles
that actually occur in that document will appear.
You can also use Find & Replace to search for any one of those styles.
But it would be nice to also be able to generate an index of styles used
in a document, finding what they are and where they are employed all at
once.
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?
Yes. This would be a wonderful aid.
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.
You can see that now, as far as styles are concerned.
Run your cursor through your document with the Stylist open to character
styles. The page style indicator on the status bar at the bottom of the
page shows your current page style, the paragraph style indicator on the
extreme left of the formatting toolbar shows the current paragraph
style, and the current character style is highlighted in the Stylist.
The formatting toolbar also shows the current font, font size, and
whether italics, bolding, or underlining is applied at the current
cursor position, though these last three are easily enough seen in any case.
Unfortunately, if direct formatting has been applied lavishly, the
actual formatting of much document may have very little to do with the
styles that have been applied, lost and buried under direct formatting.
That, I think, is the greatest problem for many documents.
How about a document on Styles for WordPerfect users?
It would be very useful to have a document on differences between Word
Perfect and OOo Writer, including some commentary on styles along with
practical advice as to how a Word Perfect user can best cope with the
differences.
Currently there is an excellent migration guide which could serve as
model. The migration currently focuses mostly on MS Office users, for
obvious reasons. While it could be enhanced with more Word Perfect
examples, that would only clutter it up with things irrelevant to most
MS Office users.
Better various guides specific to particular products.
Jallan
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