Hi again, Jonathon!
On Mon, Jul 16, 2007 at 10:14:29PM +0000, jonathon wrote:
> Alan Mackenzie wrote:
> >Open Office 1.1.3 on Debian "Sarge" GNU/Linux, Gnome 2.8.3.
> > "acm-bold" fails to appear there. I can't apply that style to any
> > text. That seems to me to be a bug.
> Assuming that the style selection box you are referring to is the one
> in the formatting toolbar, it would be a major bug if it displayed
> anything other than paragraph styles.
Ah, got you! You mean, it could be that I have created "acm-normal" as a
paragraph style and "acm-bold" as a character style? I think I really
want them to be character styles (though I'm not entirely sure).
It seems to be in the "object bar": i.e., going to <view>/<toolbars> and
clicking "object bar" toggles the presence of this selection box (and the
rest of the toolbar) on and off. The box itself is the leftmost on this
toolbar.
> If, OTOH, you meant the drop down box in Stylist, then you need to
> switch to character styles, and then switch to either "hierarchical
> styles" or "all styles", after selecting "character styles".
OK, thanks.
> IF, OTOH, you were manually formatting things using the toolbar, then
> if it affected anything other than the highlighted text, it would be a
> major bug.
> >though how to use this style is currently a mystery.
I've managed to figure this out now. Click stylist, click various
buttons to get "acm-bold" displayed, select "acm-bold", click the
pouring-jug icon, then "pour" the style onto bits of text in my file.rtf.
Wow!
> is this a numbering style, character style, or paragraph
> that you managed to create, without knowing how to use?
Yes. It's a character style, I think. I have no documentation at all
(see the rest of my moan), so it's either trial and error, or a long
wearisome web search to find some tips. Usually my LWWsearches end up in
dispirited failure after wasting perhaps half an hour of time - useful
information on the web is diffuse and fragmented, and web pages are
difficult to search (in the sense of searching through a multi-page html
manual from beginning to end for "character style"). If you've got a
manual properly installed on your PC, even if it's HTML, at least you can
use grep on it to find the juicy bits.
I created this style by trial and error here, which was somewhat less
dispiriting.
[ .... ]
> To call that behaviour a bug, is to totally misunderstand styles.
At the moment, I don't have a good understanding of styles.
> > Sometimes, when I apply "acm-normal" to some text, OO decides that I
> > don't really want the font I asked for, but "Lucidabright" instead.
> > This
> Either you are attempting to use fonts that have not been installed in
> the system, or have configured some fonts to be replaced by
> LucidaBright, or you are not applying the style that you think you are,
> or any combination thereof.
I'm trying to use an uninstalled font ("Arial Narrow"), to maintain
compatibilty with the systems (typically MS Windows) of the people I'll
be sending the file to. If I've configured it to be replaced by
LucidaBright (rather than being _interpreted_ as LB), it was by accident.
I don't think I have done this. However, problems like this often
magically vanish when understanding increases. So, hopefully it'll just
go away. :-)
> > this program feels like an early beta version - I would be grateful
> > for being persuaded I'm mistaken here. I'm hoping that it's only
> > buggy in those few areas I've tried to use and works fine otherwise.
> > just want to be a user, get my (urgent) editing done as soon as
> > possible,
> My suggestion is that you sit down and spend roughly 100 hours learning
> how to use styles. [Everything you learnt about styles from using
> WordPerfect, and Microsoft Office is wrong. Neither of those programs
> have a clue as to what styles are, much less how to implement them.] If
> you learnt how to use styles from using TeX, or DocBook, then there are
> a couple of things that are radically different in OOo.
OK, this is the crunch point. I don't want to spend 100 hours learning
styles. Life is just too short. If I were to be using OO as one of my
main workhorses, those 100 hours would certainly be a worthwhile
investment. But I just want to write a few letters every now and then,
and (my current thing) my CV. Are you suggesting that OpenOffice isn't
really the right tool for the job I need to do?
Actually, I don't really want to use styles at all; they feel so heavy
and bureaucratic. Creating styles is about as much fun as writing type
declarations in a language like Ada. It's fine if you're writing a
multi-gigabyte piece of software, but a real downer if you need a
200-line script. (Hello, Bash, AWK, Perl, Python and friends!)
What I would like is a nice zippy repetitive search and replace;
something that I could search for "LucidaBright, font-size 9, not Bold"
with, and replace with, say, "Arial Narrow, font-size 10". This would
stop at each pertinent place in the text, prompting me with "Replace?
Y/n". This doesn't seem to be part of OO 1.1.3. Does it exist in later
versions?
> jonathon
--
Alan Mackenzie (Ittersbach, Germany).
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