Robin Laing wrote:
Jonathon Blake wrote:
You can easily find where styles changes in the document. Finding all
changes based on direct formatting is less easy.
In most cases, certainly over 90% of such changes in most documents,
just look at the screen.
But for less visible changes, say a small reduction of character spacing
in some text to force a line break exactly where wanted, there is no
*easy* way to spot the differences.
You can select text between visible changes, then look in Format ->
Character... to see if any of the values are greyed out. If they are,
that indicates that this value is being changed somewhere in your text
selection.
You can also often find out where direct formatting occurs by pressing
Ctrl-Shift-Space alternating with Ctrl-Z and seeing what jumps.
Directly formatted language property changes between sections of text
are usually not visible at all, say a change between Canadian English
and Australian English.
This is indeed less than satisfactory.
That is one reason why strict use of styles is recommended over direct
formatting in OOo Writer. In OOo Writer you can far more easily see any
changes in style. Accordingly, if you don't use any direct formatting
then the problem of seeing direct formatting that is not easily visible
vanishes.
That doesn't seem to me to be a philosophically satisfactory reason to
always use styles ... to cover a hole in the interface, though it is
certainly a practical reason to use styles in the case of OOo Writer.
If you want to search for text ranges that have particular attributes,
of course you mostly find all text ranges with the attributes you are
searching for by using Find & Replace. This is often *very* helpful in
finding odd bits of formatting that you know to look for, as it finds
everything. Play with it using a complicated document and see.
Many in this thread have expressed a general wish for an easy way to
ascertain text range boundaries. (Even a simple context menu command
"Select current text range" would be a help.)
A character formatting toolbar like that in Quark Express would also be
of help (and there are many other possible solutions).
Meanwhile, learn to use what is available.
Jallan
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