Le dimanche 30 octobre 2005 à 09:13 +0100, Giuseppe Bilotta a écrit : > As I mentioned in one of the parts of my mail that you > snipped, I have nothing against language selection in style. > Why? Because language is a property of the text. True, it's > not a property with an immediate visual feedback, but it can > influence typesetting (by e.g. changing the hyphenation > points and thus the overall formatting of the paragraph).
If language can influence typesetting then let's have it influence typesetting, not the other way round like now. ie permit conditional styling which I think it's clear by now is the only expressed need for style <-> language interactions. ie make the language field in styles mean "if the text is in this language" not "set the text to this language" and have OO.o switch between alternatives automatically (when this filed is set, allow creation of sibling styles for other languages and define one default style if the language condition is not met) > I am not sure what you mean by language conditionals, OTOH. > Something like: "if the language is Italian, format this > way, if the language is not format this other way"? If this > is it, the idea doesn't appeal to me very much, honestly. > > > With free cascading styles you'd have a better workaround for languages > > than now, since you'd be able to short-circuit the macro step but it > > would still be a workaround. Just consider what happens if someone > > changes the language in your style instead of just changing the > > formatting attributes -> instant content loss > > Why would someone change the language in any of my styles? Because you can (usual stupid reason : if you expose a control to users don't be surprised they'll use it). And you can't do it sanely because you don't have the affected text on-screen and can not check you're doing the right thing. Honestly instead of continuing to avoid the issue and devise better workarounds than the current workaround please all of you forget the current implementation and focus on the two needs that have emerged : 1. set the language of the text while typing, with possibility to change later the langage of a selected part of the document if it has wrongly been entered (later enhancements : sync with input methods, autodetection routines, etc) 2. have language influence typesetting (your words, not mine, but all too true). This need is not limited to character styling, you can imagine adding a small flag before §s for example. For me: 1. clearly requires what you have been called hard-formatting in this thread (it's not formatting, but it's certainly hard ie not mutable) 2. calls for conditional formatting in my mind. If you disagree here, please argue starting from the user need not the current implementation. You can arrive to the "styles need to set language" conclusion if you want to but please show how it will actually help users to have it this way. I posit anything else than what I propose will be suboptimal, as my proposal is a direct mapping of what users been asking for. Regards, -- Nicolas Mailhot
