I was wondering about the desirability of a possible extension to
formatting/styles.
I am a programmer / software architect now, but in a "former life"
(ages ago) I worked as the sysadmin at a commercial typesetting house
(probably a nearly-dead breed by now). There I was in charge of all of
the varied computer systems - and of doing translations between several
mutually-exclusive typesetting systems (I suspected mutually hostile)
like cg, linotype, cci, penta, magna, zix and a few others.
Almost all of them had a couple of "format" features which I think
might be rather useful. I'll give a couple of examples here:
1. A "delay" or "at location" feature existed which basically said
start with such-and-such format (font, size, paragraph params, etc.),
and at this point (usually specified in terms of page position, number
of lines down, or inches/picas/mm/etc. down from paragraph start)
change the format to do something else automatically. (A simple
example: start with a line length of, say 6". Every 3 lines, decrease
the line length by 0.5" until it reaches a width of 3", and then stay
at that length - all in a single paragraph).
2. Automatic text - or file - insertion was also possible in many
of these systems as the "automatic text" could be entered as part of
the format (style) command itself, _or_ it could be entered once in the
document and automatically copied and duplicated elsewhere in the
document when the format was found in the doc. This was extremely
useful for boilerplate among other things, as if the "boilerplate" was
in a separate file, it made it possible to create a large number of
docs (contracts and font display pages come to mind) so that the
appropriate text could be entered once and included in hundreds of of
documents. And if the boilerplate changed, one only had to print out
new copies of the docs including it to have the newest version with the
changes included. (a real time saver when there are hundreds of docs).
I suspect that these might be possible by including some type of macro
capability as a part of a style, but I haven't figured out how
design/code either of these yet at all. The second one might be the
more useful, so I would like to look at it first.
But before I go off and start trying to work on either of these (a)
does anyone else think that they might be useful in general (or are
they too much "out in left field" for most users), and/or (b) is anyone
else already working on something akin to either of them?
Thanks
- Bill
--
william w. austin waus...@speakeasy.net
"life is just another phase i'm going through. this time, anyway ..."
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: discuss-unsubscr...@openoffice.org
For additional commands, e-mail: discuss-h...@openoffice.org
