Afternoon, Jonathon!
On Tue, Jul 17, 2007 at 11:01:54AM +0000, jonathon wrote:
> Alan Mackenzie wrote:
[ .... ]
> If they are for single words, then you want them as character styles.
> If they are for sentences, then you probably want them as paragraph
> styles.
OK. But then I have a suspicion that having a bullet on the text will
become part of that style.
[ .... ]
> Wander over to OOoAuthors.org, and download the documentation there.
There seems only to be version 2 documentation there. Where do I find
the doc for 1.1.[35]?
> > manual properly installed on your PC, even if it's HTML, at least you
> > can use grep on it to find the juicy bits.
> Most OOo documentation for users to download is in ODF or PDF format.
> AFAIK, grep doesn't work on either. There are a couple of tools that
> claim to index them. [I uninstalled the only one I tried one day after
> installing it, because it was using so much of my RAN & CPU that I
> couldn't do anything else.)
Why isn't it published in plain old text, too? It's far easier to read
(because you choose your own font, etc. and there are much better tools
available for displaying plain text), far easier to search, and has an
order of magnitude better signal to noise ratio. Of course, you don't
get the diagrams, though.
> > I'm trying to use an uninstalled font ("Arial Narrow"), to maintain
> Trying to use uninstalled fonts will always give one problems. Using
> installed fonts that have a slightly different name from the one that
> thinks they have will also give one problems. [I've got three fonts
> that are called "Times New Roman *". ( The asterisk represents the
> different suffixes for the name.) When "Times new Roman" is specified
> in a style, the results are horrible. (A cross between Comic Sans and
> Goudy, with a touch of Black Letter.)
Hah!
> > OK, this is the crunch point. I don't want to spend 100 hours
> > learning
> That is my estimation of how long it takes to learn how to use all of
> the components of OOo. Styles is the critical part of using all
> components other than Base.
> > 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?
> It will work for what you want to do.
But I need it to work _without_ me having to invest a vast amount of
learning time.
> The difference between using styles, and not using styles is akin to
> the difference between using a sharp knife, and a blunt knife to carve
> meat. Both will do the job, but it is much easier when the knife is
> sharp.
With all due respect, I think it's more like the difference between using
specialised butchers' tools and a normal kitchen knife. The former, in
trained hands, will slice up a pig far more efficiently, but would be
overkill for cutting up a pork chop to make stew.
> > Actually, I don't really want to use styles at all; they feel so
> > heavy and bureaucratic.
> With styles, you can focus on content, and forget about appearance,
> until after the fact. Then you can toss the styles over the parts you
> want highlighted., or whatever.
> Everything that uses the same style will have the same attribute. [A
> very useful advantage when you have a couple of thousand colours in
> your colour palette, and you need to match the exact colour, every
> time.]
Jonathon, I don't really want to use styles at all; really I don't.
Maybe I _ought_ to want to use them, just like I ought to want to declare
all my variables before writing a shell script. But I don't. If I were
writing a 150 page manual, that would be different. I don't like
bureaucracy (please believe me here, I live in Germany ;-). I'd _hate_
having to put "SOURCE COMPUTER: IBM 370\nOBJECT COMPUTER: IBM 370" at the
top of every program, but people once did.
And I hate having my spontaneous creativity crushed by having first to
think about things like styles: how many do I need, what should I call
them, or will the default ones do, where do I load them from, what
happens if I need to tweak a format in one place without hitting the
others, what will I suffer if I carry on _without_ styles. I don't want
to clutter my mind up with such stuff (at least, not yet). My attitude
probably isn't unusual amongst computer users.
> > What I would like is a nice zippy repetitive search and replace;
> With styles, you'd simply change the attributes to the ones that you do
> want.
Yes, indeed. But I'd _still_ like that zippy repetitive search and
replace. At this point, you'll probably be saying "feel free to submit a
patch!", which is fair enough.
> > This doesn't seem to be part of OO 1.1.3. Does it exist in later
> > versions?
> That is why you need to learn how to use styles. (Well, what you would
> do would be to change the font in the style, and everywhere the style
> was used, the font would automatically change.)
Or, that is perhaps why I should be using a program more aligned with my
needs. Chances are, there isn't one. ;-(
It would also be nice to be able to see somehow where styles have been
applied to text, and things like that.
> jonathon
--
Alan Mackenzie (Ittersbach, Germany).
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
