Sunday, October 30, 2005 Nicolas Mailhot wrote: >> the 'stupid & dangerous'argument would mean you can't >> give them pens or scissors because they can poke their >> eyes out.
> The difference being software is supposed to be smarter than scissors, > and when an application lets users do obviously stupid things they blame > the stupid application (except when it has been elevated to fact of life > like MSO) Yes, but this is like saying that the operating systems should not give the ability to delete files or overwrite them, because it can (and it does!) have horrible effects (destroyed data, mostly). (snipping around) >> I assume your typesetters know they shouldn't alter the text >> (delete parts, add gibberish, white it out so that all pages >> come out blank, etc), correct? Well, just the same way you >> can tell them to not touch the Whatever_language styles. >> >> If necessary, it could be possible to add extra checks like: >> ensuring the language styles are always toplevel, locking >> them or whatever, but in the end you cannot create any >> mechanism that is totally foolproof. > Agree there too except so far no safeguards have been proposed at all. > But they could. I almost proposed several but then I remembered my > typesetting days (I'm sorry, I'm a dangerous individual who got exposed > to translators and typesetters). Well, no safeguards have been proposed because it wasn't clear to me how and why these things could happen :) Are you sure that "don't tuch the Whatever_Lanauge styles" guideline wouldn't suffice? After all, this isn't any different than "don't alter the text" or "don't delete the file" :) > You're assuming there there will always be a 1<->1 relationship between > the tagging translators use and the tagging typesetters use. This is not > the case. As you will know if you've done any professional typesetting a > colour page costs a lot more than a black and white one. So I can > imagine easily typesetters deciding to turn a few special pages to > colour, and leave the rest black and white (there are probably many > reasons why one may format parts of a document differently than others, > this is only one scenario). > Special formatting may include changing text colour based on language, > using colour language icons instead of B&W ones, etc. > Now if this was something planned from the beginning, your scenario > would still work because the translators would have been handled > sections with different set of styles and been told to use greek and > colour_greek depending on the place in the document. > Unfortunately this kind of decision is left to the last moment (going > full colour, B&W only or mixed depends on your budget). If you had > something like my conditional styling all would be ok. But in your case > since you depend on language<->format relations staying the same during > the document lifetime, there would be a lot of restyling to do in a > hurry. Ah, excellent example ... too bad it shows what I think is a small flaw in your expectations: this kind of featureset is to be found in DTP applications, *not* standard wordprocessing apps. So, if I were you, I wouldn't keep my hopes too high. This being said, however, the concept of 'conditional style', which is pretty much orthogonal to the cascading property, has other (more 'stylish') uses even in the most simple cases. Consider for example the 'Emphasis' style. What should happen when you add emphasis to a piece of text which is already emphatic? You may want to remove the emphasis, or add more emphasis (e.g. turn on bold if simple emphasis is italic). This is currently achieved in OOo by having two styles (emphasis and strong emphasis), but it could be (conceptually better) be done by having 'emphasis' as a conditional style: if the surrounding text is not italic, turn italic on; if it's italic, but not bold, turn bold on too; if it's bolditalic, add underline. (For example.) I don't honestly think this will be implemented, although I agree with you that it would be a nice, and useful, feature. Which is very curious because all these missing features are standard in e.g. the CSS specification, commonly used to style SGML and XML documents. *sigh* BTW, in your specific examples workaround can be devised that involve things like splitting the colour pages out of the documents and adding the color feature to the greek style in those spliced out pages only, etc. But I agree with you that having conditional styles would be nifty, for this and other applications. I wonder if we could raise a feature request for full CSS2 styling support? -- Giuseppe "Oblomov" Bilotta --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
