This is a long reply, so please read it through before
replying to it :)
Friday, October 28, 2005 Andrew Brown wrote:
> Well, I think that the border between hard and soft
> formatting is more flexible than you suppose. Down at the
> level of the actual XML, they are equally hard. What makes
> something "soft" rather than "hard" is that it can be
> redefined independently to reflect its semantics. For
> example, the important thing about a "Heading 1" style is
> that it represents an important subject division, and I
> can decorate this as I want with a whole bundle of
> formatting attributes that can be separately redefined.
> But a language attribute can't be decorated in that way.
> It is is purely semantic. It's on the line between hard
> and soft in that sense.
> There's nothing to stop my macro being expanded to add
> something like a different font for Swedish text. In that
> case, with two attributes, it's applying a style -- but
> (and this may be important) one which inherits all the
> other attributes from the surrounding text. And it's that
> broad- minded inheritance mechanism which you can't easily
> set up with the stylist, which demands that you specify
> the style from which yours will inherit. I still think I
> am applying a style here, rather than hard formatting. Of
> course, if you want to change that style, you have to edit
> the macro, rather than the style defnition; and this is a
> pain. But it doesn't have to be. A sufficiently ingenious
> add-on writer could make a dialogue box that let you
> rewrite the macro as easily as you currently change
> styles. Then what would the difference be?
Let me reply to these two paragraphs at the same time. The
main difference between manually (or macro) applied
'formatting' (and I'm including language in this because
it's a property which is handled at the same level as actual
visual formatting in OOo) and formatting applied via styles
is that the former, once applied sticks there, while the
second can mutate by changing the style. Hence the
difference between 'hard' and 'soft'. In some way, the first
is 'carved in stone' whereas the second is only 'indicated'.
An obvious remark is that text in a foreign language is in
that foreign language, full stop. It's highly dubious that
you could have second thoughts ("hm, maybe this isn't
Russian, maybe this is Japanese") and have such second
thoughts consistently across all occurrences of that
language. *However*, taking your example ("different font
for Swedish text") is exactly the reason why it should
nevertheless be part of an appropriate style, and not be
applied manually (or macroly): if halfway through a document
to decide, or otherwise need, to set all the foreign text
in a different font (or with a different font property,
typically in italic), you can of course change the macro,
which will work for all the *future* text, but it won't
change all the text you already typed in. This is *exactly*
what styles were made for.
I hope this helps explaining what I understand to be the
difference between hard and soft formatting, and why it's
pertinent to this discussion :)
Now, concerning your macro:
> In any case, the interesting question is whether my method
> is actually useful to anyone. I can't see that OOo will
> change its model for representing languages in a hurry. In
> the meantime there are lots of people who have problems
> with the present system. I offer a way around some of
> those problems. It may be imperfect. But it may be better
> than nothing.
Let me clarify one thing: I have no objection to your macro.
Actually, I would go as far as saying that your macro (or
more probably a more exhaustive and customizable successor
of it) is *the* correct /*WORKAROUND*/ for a limitation in
OOo: the inability to cascade character styles.
Just to make my point even clearer: I have *no* objection to
'language' being treated at the same level as fonts or
whatever; it is, after all, a textual property, albeit not
an immediatly visual one (since in really it influences
hyphenation and hence ultimately typesetting). My gripe is
with OOo's inability to cascade styles. Your usage of macros
is a barely functional (although /the/ optimal one, given
what we have) workaround. The limitation in OOo remains, and
IMHO *should* *be* *addressed*.
The next question is: is there already an issue on this?
Should we create it? Note the the issue should be on the
cascability (ehehehe) of (at least character, but I would
also say paragraph) styles, not so much specifically on the
management of language; indeed, allowing cascading styles
will solve the language issue *and* a bunch of other
problems.
--
Giuseppe "Oblomov" Bilotta
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