Robin Laing wrote:
No. But there are five lists in the Stylist you can set to show the
current applied styles. Why so desperate to see all character styles
along with all page styles along with all bullet styles at the same
time? Normally you don't work with them all at the same time, or more
than one at the same time.
And a particular point in the document may be using direct formatting in
any case.
What about imported documents? Am I supposed to know all the styles
that are used by all the people that may make a document that I have
to work with or take a piece of or add to?
Yes.
See what applied styles they use when you are working directly with
merging such documents, or updating such documents. Otherwise, you don't
care.
For example, if you are working with a document using styles and you
want to make a new heading, find what paragraph style is used for a
heading at the same level in the structural hierarchy of headings in
that document, and apply its style to your new heading. You don't have
to know anything about its precise attributes if you don't want to.
But that is only 4 pedals and will still be based on a car. Same with a
tank or tracked vehicle. They are all different but are basically the
same. As you state, you cannot be by with only one or two styles. A
style can change so much that it would be impossible to know every one.
As I said earlier and this is the biggest problem. I have to work with
documents from others that I cannot restyle as I see fit all the time.
I may not or won't know their style. Also the style/format may be
created with OOo as it imports from some other source.
If the imported document uses styles, you can know the details of
whatever styles they use by looking at the properties of those styles.
If you are attempting to mix documents that have, for example, very
different attributes for their body text style, then you have to decide
which set of style attributes to use, or apply other attributes that you
use.
A reasonable way to do this is load the two documents separately, and
change the styles of paragraphs in one of them to match the styles in
the other in respect to title hierarchy and so forth. Then start copying
and pasting. You can also save style definitions to a file and then load
the definitions into another document if you want.
Another way is to set up a blank document with your planned styles as
you wish, and paste from one document or the other as required to build
your new document, applying styles as you go, when they are different
then the styles that appear when you paste in the material from one of
the other documents.
I've done such things when merging multiple documents in MS Word which
have been all created using direct formatting, not styles. Either first
get the documents into as much the same format as seems reasonable, then
start merging, or set up a format for the new document, and then
starting merging.
I would work the same thing if required to merge two Word Perfect
documents to create a third Word Perfect document.
Your main problem seems to be that you are trying to work in OpenOffice
Writer without first learning how it works and what you can do with it,
and were also working under grave misunderstanding as to how it works
underneath. Of course documents in Writer didn't respond and update as
you expected.
Read the manual.
A reread of a manual provides great enlightenment.
On a first reading of a manual for a new product, one misses so much,
and so much goes over one's head.A rereading after one has struggled
with a product often proves amazingly enlightening. And another reading
a few months later proves even more enlightening, as one is now familiar
enough with the product to really grasp what the writer was attempting
to convey, to understand the techniques outlined, and often to realize
how clumsily one may still have be using the product.
Jallan
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