Robin Laing wrote:
I have a passion for Reveal Codes, even after learning styles and how
OOo works. They are a great tool and can be very useful when creating
documents from start to finish.
I am at a loss for words.
But when working with various documents
from different people and OS's and editor programs, styles can blow up
in your face.
Totally agreed. But they are better than arbitrary direct formatting. At
least one can change multiple parts of the document more quickly if the
document uses styles.
It would be okay if you could delete all styles and start from scratch
but that isn't an option in most cases. Lack of control on documents if
forcing many in my work to move to LaTeX as WordPerfect isn't one of the
"preferred" applications anymore. The number of new LaTeX books that I
have seen on peoples desks are surprising. (I am checking the LaTeX
features of OOo.)
You can’t so far as I know, convert ODT to LaTeX or LaTeX to ODT. If
LaTeX does seem to you superior, for what you are doing, then I think
you should use it. But a vague reference to “lack of control” is not
convincing. What lack of control is found in OpenOffice.org? What
difficulty is there in searching out the properties at any position in
the text?
As I suggested on 3395, a method of seeing where the code changes occur
in the XML file would be a very nice compromise. When you import a
document that came from someone else, it would make finding that strange
style (from the import) that is affecting other parts of the document.
The reveal "non printing characters" doesn't do the trick.
Well, you can always load the XML as source and print it out or view it
on the screen. But there is indeed no reason that I can see why a “Show
last saved source” command could not be introduced into OpenOffice.org.
However, you can usually find things without pouring over source code.
Press F11. That will open the Style Catalog. You can find from there the
paragraph style, character style and page style of your current cursor
position. And you can then modify that style if you wish. Select Edit ->
Find & Replace... In the box that comes up select “More Options”.
Click on the “Search for Styles” box. You can find every place a
particular paragraph style is used by this method. Unclick it. Then use
“Attributes” or “Formatting” to find any place some formatting that
bothers you appears. You can then use the Style Catalog to see what
style is being used at that position.
When doing this kind of checking, it often helps to change the style,
say changing the font color to green, then use Find & Replace... to look
for any green text. Once found, I can decide what I want to do with it.
Then change the color back from green in that style.
I don’t find it at all hard to search out styles.
If someone has done direct formatting on top of styles, I can remove all
direct formatting in an area, see if anything changes, then use CTRL-Z
to put it back, and start replacing it by character styles and paragraph
styles if I want.
I have used the reveal codes macro and it has saved me time when
searching for the elusive formatting change.
Whereas I had it on my machine for a while, years ago, and never found
it of much use. I don’t need a code to tell me some text is bold, when I
can see that it is bold. And making sure styles are used almost
everywhere prevents hard-to-see font changes from being missed. If I
discover that at some place Times (Postscript) is being used instead of
Times New Roman, I can quick use Find & Replace... to locate all places
in the text where Times is being used. If the problem is a style which
uses Times, I can then change that style to use Times New Roman. If the
problem is direct formatting. I can globally replace all occurrences of
Times with Times New Roman, without worrying at all about where exactly
the passages start and end, without searching for codes.
I don’t understand what elusive formatting changes you are talking
about. If it is, for example, different ways of indenting on paragraphs,
then change the style to remove indent, look for paragraphs that have
not changed to fit, do what it necessary to fix them, then reset the
indent in the style. I don’t need to worry about codes which don’t exist
in the first place.
I have not used WordPerfect since 1999 and have used StarOffice or
OpenOffice since but I still would like to have a Reveal Codes ability.
I used WordPerfect much earlier, on the Commodore Amiga. I liked it. But
most of the errors I fixed by “Reveal codes” were errors caused by it
being very much a Control-code-based system which allowed non-matching
codes to exist in the text stream. I’ve never found myself seriously
wishing that MS Word or OpenOffice.org Writer had a “Reveal Codes” feature.
Jim Allan
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