At 09:25 11/11/2007 -0500, E Goldberg wrote:
I started a new document, created a table 24 rows by 7 columns. I
resized the first column to be a bit wider, typed "Now is the time"
in column 1. It came out in Times New Roman by default. Then I
copied that cell down a bunch of rows. I selected those rows and
modified the font of all to Arial (still size 12).
Then I changed the word "Now" on one of those lines to Arial size
10. I then selected the word "Now". I double clicked the
paintbrush to copy the style and clicked on the word "Now" on
another row. The rest of that line reverted to Times New Roman.
This seems wrong to me. Bug or feature?
For what it's worth, I can see what's happening here. The table is a
red herring, by the way: you get the same results if you do it with
paragraphs in open text.
When you type the text, it takes on a paragraph style. This would
probably be Default outside a table or Table Contents within. This
paragraph style will include a font - Times New Roman in your
case. When you modify the font to Arial, you are applying a
character attribute that overrides the font property in the paragraph
style, but the paragraph still possesses that style - albeit with
this property hidden in part. When you make your next change (the
size change in your example), you again change a character attribute
which overrides the paragraph style.
The key factor is what happens when you double-click the Format
Paintbrush. According to the help text, this "[c]opies the
formatting of the last selected character and of the paragraph that
contains the character". So the paint bucket is now armed with not
only your new size (from the character attributes) but also the
paragraph style itself. And when you use it, it applies the
character style to the identified word (which your example does
correctly, changing the size), but also the paragraph style to the
containing paragraph. The problem (as you see it) is that this
application of paragraph style overrides the (character) font change
that you made earlier, enforcing the paragraph style's preference
instead. Interestingly, it doesn't do that for all changes, as you
will see if you use the paint bucket on another word in your
example The new word will be shrunk to the smaller size, but the
original smaller word will not change font. The problem occurs, in
fact, only when the change to a character attribute is applied to an
entire paragraph in this way.
Is this a feature or a bug? I suspect that, because it is well
documented, because you are not doing things in what would be thought
of as the best way, and because there are a number of workarounds, it
would be considered a feature. Sorry!
There are a number of workarounds:
o If your preference for Arial over Times New Roman is general,
change the default font at Tools | Options... | OpenOffice.org Writer
| Basic Fonts (Western). As you will see, you can do this for
"Current document only" where appropriate.
o If you need to apply font (or other character) changes to complete
paragraphs, do so in preference by applying an appropriate paragraph
style. Either modify the existing paragraph style's font or create a
new style (possibly using New Style from Selection) and set its font
as required.
o (Here's the clever bit!) Use the method you have described, but
with one extra trick. When pasting the format from the paint bucket,
use Ctrl+click instead of just click. This excludes the copied
paragraph formatting from the paste action.
o The problem occurs only when you have formatted an entire
paragraph using a character attribute. If you can contrive to format
only part of a paragraph, everything will work as you wish. If, for
example, you were to add a trailing space to your text and then to
change only the original text to Arial, leaving the (invisible) space
still in Times New Roman, you would not see this problem. You can
even remove the space after you have changed the font: since the
change was applied to less than the complete paragraph, it appears to
continue to behave as if it is. In each of these cases, you would
want to make these changes to one copy of your text before copying
it, of course.
o If you have only a few changes to make, you can make them all
individually, rather than using the Formatting Paintbrush.
I trust this helps.
Brian Barker
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