klaus schmirler wrote:
Now suppose someone switches from OOo to WP and wants to erase such an
essay title. They will find that the "quote characters" cannot be
deleted. Before getting a new keyboard, they can call up the RC frame
and see that there is a style left, and that that style's content are
two quote signs. Problem solved (and knowledge gained).
This is good example of why it is a bogus claim that use of styles and
use of code tokens in a text stream are in opposition to one another.
Supporting these sorts of styles would be an excellent enhancement for
OOo Writer, one I would live to see.
However, if this style were supported in OOo Writer (and MS Word),
applications which do not contain formatting code tokens in the text
stream, your difficulty could never arise. A style is an attribute of a
text range. If you delete that text range, the style goes with it, in
this case the quotation marks. You could not have a case of quotation
marks standing alone that could not be deleted.
A "reveal codes" really is necessary in a text processing system that
uses code tokens within the text stream because you want to debug the
kind of problems that this type of architecture produces. But those kind
of problems can't exist in a system which doesn't use code tokens with
the text stream. There can be no style code tokens left behind when code
tokens are not used at all.
The same may apply using OOo. Suppose the right hand side of your page
appears to be unused. Did someone change the margins or is this a two
column layout that just doesn't have enough text to overflow, or the
text is protected? Instead of wrecking my brain for the different
possibilities, I'd rather have one place where I can check what is the
matter.
OOo Writer defaults to showing page margins. And even if you have turned
off View -> Text Boundaries, a foolish thing to do in my opinion, OOo
Writer insists on showing the lines around columns and blocks of text
that include columns, these blocks being called in OOo Writer (and MS
Word) "sections".
Not much brain wracking. You just look at the page and see the margins.
Also, in OOo Writer, text itself cannot be protected, though "sections"
can be protected (and cells can be protected) both "sections" and cells
being surrounded by grey lines when not explicitly bordered.
Is there protection involved? Just try typing in that area to see.
As to being "one place", my memory of working with Word Perfect is
vague, but when I did use it, it was often the case that the code
invoking a particular format was sometimes pages before the current
page, not to speak of problems with tokens that can be nested and
problems with orphaned tokens.
In OOo Writer. margins are absolutely controlled by the current page
style and you need only look in Page formatting or Page style formatting
for identical information. There is *one* place to look for current page
properties, though more than one way of getting there (as there should be).
Paragraph indentation is controlled by the current paragraph formatting.
There is one place to look, without need to search for codes which are
perhaps pages back.
Columns are controlled by the current section, again not by codes
possibly pages back. So there's only one place to look, within the
formatting properties of the current section.
However, for a naive user, finding where to look is, I admit, sometimes
as difficult as finding an exact code within a reveal codes mode.
For example, if you write click within a section, the context menu does
not provide a "Section..." formatting option, comparable to the
"Page...", "Paragraph..." and "Character..." formatting options. If the
user doesn't know about sections, or knows about them only vaguely, the
user is likely to be puzzled about what he or she is seeing and how to
modify it.
OOo Writer does lag behind MS Word in providing easy ways to discover
current formatting properties. But enhancements ought to reveal the
structure as it actually exists within OOo Writer, not attempt to
emulate a reveal codes interface for an entirely different way of doing
things, one which misrepresents what is actually happening with OOo Writer.
Jallan
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