Robin Laing wrote:
I have used styles on created documents. Reveal codes are great when
you have a problem with formatting. No multiple clicking of multiple
tabs or windows to see that someone had made some strange changes that
were left in by default.
First, you don't see "changes". You see what is there. Whether it got
there by changing or by initial typing or in some other way can only be
guessed at, and doesn't matter at all.
Second, if you don't like something, just *change* it. How it got there
is irrelevant.
I have a document that has blinking text that I have imported. I cannot
find out how the text was formatted to blink. I have checked the
character styles which is default and the paragraph style with was
heading 1. I highlited the text and looked at the formatting but I
still didn't see the blink setting. In reveal codes I could have found
the exact location where the blink was set as it would have been displayed.
Nonsense, in this case.
You found the exact location where the blinking was set by looking at
the normal screen in OOo Writer, just as you would in Word Perfect.
Turning on reveal codes in Word Perfect would have shown you *nothing*
more than you already knew, except some irrelevancies such as, for
example, whether bolding was applied before or after blinking (if
bolding was applied), something which doesn't matter in Word Perfect and
does not apply in OOo Writer.
What you could have done in Word Perfect, that you don't mention, is to
turn off the blinking by removing the token that turned the blinking
effect on. (You could have also removed the token that turns the
blinking effect off if you wanted to, indeed it would be best to do so.)
What you can do instead in OOo Writer is to highlight a text range that
includes the blinking area (and may include more if you want) then turn
off the blinking effect.
How do you find where to turn it off?
*All* character effects in selected text or the cursor position are
controllable directly through standard "Character" formatting dialog box
*without exception*. There is *no* other place to directly view all
current character effect attributes on selected text or the current
character position and there are *no* text character effect attributes
that cannot be controlled from there.
This is the *one* place. It reveals all character properties in a text
range object and can be used to set such properties. For these
properties as revealed at the programming level, see
http://api.openoffice.org/docs/common/ref/com/sun/star/style/CharacterProperties.html
There is one-to-one correlation.
You can access this "Character" dialog box in various ways, through
Format -> Character..., through a context menu by selecting
"Character...", or through one of the icons on the "Text Object"
toolbar. But it's the same controlling dialog box with "Character" in
the title bar.
In the "Characters" dialog box is a Tab called "Font effects", surely
the obvious place to look first.
One of the effects listed there is called "Blinking".
Where were you looking? Where else would you expect to find this and
other formatting character attributes?
If you missed it here, you could just as easily miss it in your desired
super-large dialog box that would include all formatting. This dialog
box does include all character attribute formatting.
Use this "Blinking" setting to turn the blinking off.
That's all.
You can press Ctrl-A to create a range to cover your entire document and
turn blinking off everywhere, without knowing or caring where it is
turned off and on.
I could delete the text and then retype the text and then play with the
formatting that the original author had done as they didn't use the
styles to remove just the blink. One simple location.
I see no sense in this. Why would you ever want to retype any text in
this circumstance (or almost any circumstance)?
Just change the formatting.
This is true no matter what word processor application, publishing
application, or text source code you are using, including Word Perfect.
If you want to experiment with some text, copy and paste it elsewhere.
Don't retype.
Your difficulties appear to be yours, not those of OOo Writer.
But if you want, with OOo Writer, you can also fiddle with the
formatting in one location. Use the single "Character" dialog box to
apply any character formatting on any text selection or multiple text
selections at any locations.
I strongly expect you could do this in Word Perfect also.
The point is if there are strange formatting as I have indicated, there
is no easy way to find them. This is where reveal codes excels.
"Reveal codes" wouldn't show you where one the character blinking
attribute might be set in Word Perfect's menus or dialog boxes either.
That you can *change codes* here, formatting codes that don't exist
internally in most word processing applications or publishing
applications is another matter.
Somehow you missed the blinking attribute in the obvious place in the
"Character" dialog box and also in the applicable "Paragraph Style:"
dialog box, and in the applicable "Character Style:" dialog box. Nothing
can help if you don't look at what is on the screen.
You can equally misread or skip formatting tags in HTML source code or
LaTex if you don't pay attention.
I love learning but writing isn't my job. It is less than 10% of my
job.
If 10% of your job involves editing documents, then you need to learn to
use whatever your tools are to do it well. A writer can more easily
ignore the complex features of a word processor than can an editor.
Again I recall that secretary who manually inserted headers and footers
into the main text of documents because she claimed she didn't have time
to learn the how to automatic headers and footers in MS Word, and it was
too complicated. After all, changing existing documents was probably
only about 10% of her job. So she manually recut and pasted those
headers and footers and manually changed the page numbers every time a
document needed to be edited and reformatted.
And there was the invoicer who worked with templates in Excel to produce
invoices, but did all the math with a calculator and then typed the
results into the spreadsheet rather than using Excel's own calculation
abilities.
I talk to other users and many that have used Word complain about
the way it formats a document.
Not surprising! People complain about every computer application,
including Word Perfect. Word Perfect users have also been complaining
for years about Corel's lack of improvements in Word Perfect.
Those of us who use OOo Writer also complain about OOo Writer's lacks,
as we individually perceive them.
Enough of a complaint to end up swearing
when it screws up their document and won't undo. I have heard enough
people apologize for this already.
"Won't undo!" Or is it that the user's don't know how to undo something
and won't take the time to learn, just blame it on no "reveal codes". Or
that they've just stumbled across one of the annoyances that every one
of us have when we use different software that does things differently,
or when we use familiar software in new ways and it doesn't behave like
we think it should.
You've complained that "blinking" wouldn't undo. But it wasn't OOo
Writer's fault. You missed the attribute setting everywhere.
But at least you had the font name and font size and whether or not bold
or italic were applied right on the top of your screen. You could have
copied the text and done a special paste as unformatted text elsewhere
in your document, applied that font at that size (with bolding or
italics or underlining if required), deleted all the text from your
Heading 1 paragraph, and then copied and pasted the fixed text into it.
You could have done this in less time than it took you to post your
message on this problem.
You could have pasted the current heading into an HTML screen, changed
the HTML source code there, then pasted it back.
Once one heading was fixed, you could have used the formatting broom to
apply its formatting to all the other headings.
Perhaps you did something like this. How did you eventually fix it?
Most of these people move to LaTeX.
One is trying to use OOo and has even created his own templates but
still has problems of getting imported documents to formatted the way
the original documents.
Irrelevant. Import a Word document into Word Perfect, and it sometimes
won't format exactly like the original either. I have to deal regularly
with Quark Express documents imported from a Macintosh system to a
Windows system, and minor differences in formatting appear which I must fix.
That is normal.
You seemingly must use OOo Office, but you don't learn it. Then you
blame the application because you won't make the time. Yet the most
trivial problems are it seems taking up a great deal of the time you are
spending on it.
You claim to want something like "Reveal Codes", but were not working
with OOo Writer's View -> Nonprinting characters set on, which does
reveal the few code tokens used by OOo Writer.
OOo Writer is far from perfect and its interface can be improved. But if
you won't make an effort to learn how it does things, and how any other
new software you are compelled to use, does things, then you are the one
who suffers, not the software.
Jallan
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