Jallan wrote:
Robin Laing wrote:
As this discussion in the past has indicated. Create the styles you
want/need and then remove all the styles in your imported document and
apply your new styles. What do you do if you don't use the same
styles between documents? You want to do something unique.
Just do something unique, any way you wish.
You can either do your unique thing through direct formatting or through
created styles or a mixture of both, whatever you want.
No argument, the issue I find is when I import a document or multiple
documents, the formatting has been severely screwed up at times.
Finding the problem has been impossible in a few cases. So much so
that I just found a Windows computer with Word on to get the work done.
Styles are great for businesses that have and want to work with set
standards. Reveal codes are better for the one time only people (like
me). Lack of reveal codes is a deal breaker for some people as well.
How many times must it be said ... there are no codes to reveal.
As someone else has stated, there is the underlying XML codes. The
styles each have a selection of options that are part of the coding.
What is reveal codes but a method of telling the user what the word
processor is doing with the text. There has to be some code someplace
that tells Writer how to display the text that is written.
The reveal codes macro works in OOo writer by inventing an imaginary
system of tokens that might exist if OpenOffice.org did use code tokens
internally, a sort of on-the-fly virtual source code. But while reveal
codes in Word Perfect, or looking at the Source code for the current web
page in a browser, reveals what is *really* underneath the display, any
reveal codes mode in OpenOffice can only be an artificial artifact on
top of OpenOffice. The same is true of MS Word.
But with OpenOffice.org, the source code that produces a document in
memory is a at least readable, in XML format. You can rename your output
document with the extension .zip, unzip it, and read the files it
contains if you have a debugging problem that requires looking at the
actual code. But the format is not linear, and accordingly is more
complex then the straightforward data stream approach that is
WordPerfect, at least on one underlying level.
We have people around here that won't use MS Office either because
there is no reveal codes.
Sigh! I wonder if there are people who won't fly in a helicopter because
it has no wings.
No, they prefer the tool that WP provides as the Styles that Word
provides are not as forgiving or as functional. Heck, Word isn't even
as nice as OOo from one persons comments. Some of these people are
moving to LaTeX instead of Word for the formatting controls. We even
have default templates in LaTeX to use.
It would be nice if OOo could provide the best of both worlds. But I
am a dreamer. :) Now if I could just get some time to learn how to
create custom styles in two minutes or less.
Press F11. Select any style in the Stylelist. Right-click. Select "New".
Name the style in the custom dialog box that comes up (and ignore all
the other fields if you want). You have created a new paragraph style in
a second or less.
Then just set any of the attributes in any of the tabs to what you want,
just as you would do with direct formatting. Select some paragraphs,
double-click on the style, and it is applied to those paragraphs. Modify
the style, and the paragraphs change accordingly.
Very quick, very fast, very intuitive, once you've done it a few times.
No worry about why an effect being turned on in one place is being
turned off in another.
The various paragraph style attribute settings are directly comparable
to individual formatting codes that would appear in front of that
paragraph in that style in Word Perfect, but they are applied all at
once, not in any order.
You might think of these attributes as being codes *on* the paragraph
instead of being codes *before* the paragraph. And since these settings
are visible within each paragraph, by selecting Format -> Paragraph and
Format -> Characters for a selected paragraph, you don't have be
concerned about some code two pages back that has set something you
don't want.
What is missing is an indication of any direct formatting that may be
subsequently placed on top of underling paragraph styles within the
paragraph.
If this is messing things up, generally speaking it is at least as fast
to select the paragraph, press CTRL-SHIFT-SPACE (or go to Format ->
Default formatting) to strip off the extra formatting, and then fix it
up directly again as it as it would to attempt to debug by searching
through codes in a reveal codes mode.
Jallan
I just tried this on a document and it didn't work as the formatting
didn't change to the default format even though the status bar show
Default. I still have to find the font and spacing issue that was
changed in a style but after setting the default style, the font issue
is still present. But what I did confirm that one of may major issues
with importing documents has been related to a style that the default
style doesn't fix. Now to find that problem.
I am not against styles. I have actually used the ones that come with
OOo with some happy success.
--
Robin Laing
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