Robin Laing wrote:
This is what I am requesting. A viewer or way of indicating that there
are changes, either directly or by styles within the text of the
documents similar to View > non-printing characters with a status bar
that shows the formatting. No mouse clicks, not scrolling to a
different part of the document. Something that shows me where in a
document the formatting changes.
Fair enough ... but myself and others have indicated that we feel that
it overkill to include every possible change of format in one dialog box.
If you want to know where formatting changes, do a Search for a
particular format attribute, and you will find each place where that
attribute appears. (There are a unfortunately a few attributes that you
can't search on.)
Perhaps separate tool bars for page formatting, paragraph formatting,
and character formatting would be better, and separate tool bars for
each of the five style panels. You could bring all the tool bars up if
you wanted. You probably wouldn't want to very often.
Quark Express, for example, has long had a floating toolbar to handle
direct character formatting.
You would rather those that want an easy to use interface for formatting
just go away but that isn't the idea of Open Source software.
A false accusation. I have expressed several times in this thread my
desire for improvements in the OpenOffice interface. So have others. And
we have provided details of what could be done. No-one is entirely
satisfied, and probably never will be. Things can always be improved,
according to someone's viewpoint.
You arguments comes across as: "because you don't totally support my
idea, you are against any interface improvements in OOo Writer".
As to the "idea of Open Source software", one of the virtues of open
source software is that people can use it as they wish without cost and
modify it freely. But if you, yourself, want any open source software
modified a particular, then do it yourself, or get others to modify it
either by persuading them that they ought to implement the ideas that
you want to see, or by paying someone to do it.
That you think your idea is good, doesn't mean that anyone has any
obligation to implement it or even think about it.
Those who donate their time or money or both to such projects call the
tune. Of course, mostly these people do listen to users and are users
themselves. But not all users agree and it is not the users who make the
decisions. The users are not the bosses.
Open source software does not even have to be market driven in many
cases. Developers can do whatever they want to do. NeoOffice is a case
in point.
Many
people that use the "most other popular word processing applications and
publishing applications" do not have a choice as many of my co-workers
when our employer changed from WP to MS Office. It was the only
choice. Now many have gone back to WP because they now have a choice.
Or Latex. The only ones that are looking at OOo are those that are only
familiar with MS Office. And that is because OOo works better for
them. Others have gone to LaTeX.
Good for them. So what is the problem? No application can be everything
for everyone. Many people want to stick with exactly what they are used
to, and within a product stick to exactly the way they have always done
things, even when shown better ways.
LaTex certainly is better than OOo Writer for some tasks. And I would be
surprised if Word Perfect is not also better than OOo Writer for
particular tasks and probably generally less buggy. And all these
products share much of the same functionality.
Personally, as a user, I find the current interface good enough that I
can quickly find what is wrong when things are wrong, and I'd rather
developers spent time on bugs and enhancements that are particularly
important to *me*.
But every user has different priorities.
There are pointers at every location where the properties are changed.
These are not tokens in the WP sense but formatting definitions. These
can be read by a dialog box that could display all the formatting at
that location and what controls it. As said by someone else, the
formatting is nested. Direct formatting is the most underlying
formatting and this sometimes can prevent styles from working properly.
Especially on imported documents.
The attributes supplied by styles can be overwritten by user-applied
direct formatting, and in some cases by other user applied styles. We
know this.
Paragraph and character styles can both control the font. Direct
formatting can also control the font. How do I quickly see where all
these changes take place. In reveal codes I just look at the RC box at
the bottom or top of the screen. I can see the "tokens" with the text.
There is no way to visualize a style change done to a "space" within a
document. I know a change has taken place but I don't know where. This
is obvious with RC's.
But you can usually see on the screen whether attribute changes take
place before or after a space if you turn on View -> Nonprinting
characters and look at the dot that represents the space. It's small,
but usually clear enough when comparing two spaces on either side of a
word whether the style of the two spaces match.
If it's not clear, though it usually is, you have the font name, font
size, and three separate attributes of the current characters at the top
of the window. And you can add other character attribute buttons to the
current toolbar or a toolbar of your own if you want. I don't recall
ever having trouble easily finding out whether an attribute changes
before or after a particular space, when I cared about it.
And I am the kind of niggler who does are about such things. The spaces
around a word or section of text in boldface should also be bold. I've
even jiggered with changing the font widths on spaces following italic
text to increase the spacing for better appearance.
As to whether a character *style* changes, just press F11 and look at
the highlighted names in the character style listing in the Stylist. But
you don't *want* to do that. Fair enough. But I don't really *want* one
single dialog box filling the screen with irrelevancies about paragraph
indents and paragraph spacing and over 30 paragraph formatting features
when I'm working with characters.
How can this happen? Simple, someone edits a document and deletes a
line, one character at a time but leaves one blank space. I don't know
how many times I have gone to insert some text only to insert it within
the wrong style and end up with the wrong format because I don't know
where the style ends. Or worse, I cannot paste it within the style.
So if you make such an error, press CTRL-Z, move back or forward one
space, and insert your text again. Then fix the space also if you want.
This is hardly worth fussing over. You don't have to know or care what
the wrong formatting was. Just fix it and move on.
I don't know what you mean by "I cannot paste it within the style". If
you want the attributes of the pasted text to remain, then do a normal
paste. If you want the attributes of the passage into which you are
pasting the text to take precedence, do Paste Special and choose
"Unformatted text". If you have another problem, then explain what your
problem is.
You are obviously having problems. So provide details of one at least of
the problems, not undetailed references to things that don't work the
way you are trying to make them work. The interface you describe won't
help in such matters, as it still wouldn't show anything that is not
seeable now by looking at the formatting dialog boxes for the current
object.
I'd like those dialog boxes improved by just making them non-modal. I'd
like also to see the underlying style formatting also in those boxes.
I'd like lots of improvements.
But meanwhile, I honestly don't find slows me down noticeably. The
formatting at any point is usually obvious without opening these
dialogs, and I can use the formatting broom to select formatting from
one place and paste it over another without worrying about what the
formatting is, if I don't want to.
I would use WP if there was a native Linux version. But I am trying to
may OOo appeal to the WP users out there and make it better for me as well.
Yes. But if others have different ideas about what is better ... ?
And I rather expect that many of your WP users wouldn't care at all for
your idea.
They want a reveal code mode that allows them to see and *edit* code
tokens directly and nothing less, not a screen-filling dialog which
would mostly show attributes not applicable to the current situation.
Jallan
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