There *is* a "reveal styles." It's in the Formatting Toolbar, where the
style for the paragraph containing the cursor is clearly displayed. Press
F11 and you'll get a list of all the available paragraph styles. Right click
on any one of them, click "Modify" and you can see all of the formatting
characteristics applying to that style. Make any formatting changes you want
and they will apply to any paragraph having that particular style.
As for other formatting parameters, you don't need a code to tell you that a
word is in Boldface as it will appear in Boldface on the screen. Blue text
will appear blue, and you won't need a code to tell that. Now, you may not
know *why* the text is blue, but if you simply right click on the applied
paragraph style in the style list, you can then change the character
formatting to any color you want (the same as you would with direct
formatting, just within the style itself). Once changed, all paragraphs
having that paragraph style will automatically change to the new color. With
WordPerfect, you'd have to go into each and every paragraph or column frame
and manually change each one to the color you want. And, if you made a
mistake in one of them, you'd end up with inconsistent formatting. Of course
you could track it down with your reveal codes, but with styles, you
wouldn't have to.
It's not rocket science, but I'll agree that it is not intuitive to the
typewriter model followed by WordPerfect.
Let me give an example of the benefit of styles. Several years ago, my 14
year old son challenged himself to type a 50,000 word novel in November,
which is National Novel Writers Month. He met his goal, and quickly dropped
the project.
As a proud papa, I wanted to put his document to paper. He wrote the
original in WordPerfect, and it was a formatting mess, with stray tabs,
carriage returns, and inconsistent formatting across chapter and section
headings. Using WP's beloved reveal codes, I began the task of reformatting
his 127 page novel. It didn't take long for me to realize it would take days
and days to wade through all of the formatting codes inserted by WP.
Instead, I saved the document as a plain text file, stripping all
formatting. I then loaded it into LyX, which is a GUI LaTeX editor. LaTeX is
the ultimate in styles-based document processing as there is no other way to
do things. I applied the Part and Chapter styles, (called "environments" in
LaTeX speak) to the part and chapter titles, and then inserted a fully
formatted, numbered, and typed table of contents with a couple mouse clicks.
I set NO page formatting parameters such as page margins, page numbering,
etc., as those were handled entirely by the Book template (called "document
class"). I then compiled the book and had a fully formatted novel, complete
with Title page, Table of Contents, properly formatted right and left hand
pages with fully formatted headers with page numbers, etc. The entire
process took about a half hour. I surprised even myself.
I could have done the same thing with OpenOffice's styles, but they're not
quite as fully automatic as LyX/LaTeX, so it would have taken a bit longer,
but not much.
Yes, styles can be difficult to learn, much the same as learning a new cable
TV remote control. But once learned, you'll appreciate all you can do with
them, and you won't go back to the typewriter (or it's only begotten son,
WordPerfect), just like I won't go back to rabbit ears for my TV.
Virgil
-----Original Message-----
From: Tamblyne
Sent: Friday, June 21, 2013 5:29 PM
To: users@openoffice.apache.org
Subject: Re: Codes
Hi, Patricia --
Of course, you're going to be told -- and I can see that you already
have -- that "you're not doing it right." Use styles. Styles will,
apparently, take care everything, including promote world peace, as well
as fix all that's wrong with your document.
Perhaps if we asked for "reveal styles" instead of "reveal codes," we
could get some progress on this issue. The View > Non-printing
characters doesn't help much unless what you're looking for is carriage
returns/line-feeds, as far as I can tell. It certainly doesn't tell me
what styles are being applied to any given portion of the document. And
it doesn't show formatting codes, either.
As an "old" WP user (and aren't we all, at this point?), I argued
passionately for this "enhancement" long ago. The fact that we were
blown off then, and still are, is the reason I don't volunteer my time
to this project anymore.
The response to "use styles" doesn't solve the problem -- that being
that you can't tell where an applied style begins or ends when you have
a problem. Wait until you get a horizontal line under all of your
paragraphs that you can't get rid of. That's even more fun! :-D You
can spend time playing Document Detective -- or just CTRL-Z out of it
and come up with some other way to format your document the way YOU want
to.
As to your particular issue, this blue text is often automatically
applied to email addresses and hyperlinks, and you can change that under
"character styles."
As for reveal codes -- don't hold your breath. :-)
Tam
On 6/20/2013 6:54 PM, Patricia Hickin wrote:
Is there any way to reveal codes in OO (the way you can in WordPerfect)?
I am having a problem with the following:
I am preparing a list of books as follows:
In a table of two columns, I insert an image of the book cover in the
first
(a narrow) column. In the 2nd column I put info about the book: title,
author, publisher & date.
I have obtained the info from www.worldcat.org, compiled a list of the
books, copied the list into Notepad to strip it of formatting. Next I
copied the list into an OO text document and formatted it as follows:
font Calibri color black
title: 18 point bold italic
author & publishing info (two separate lines): 15 point regular.
For some reason, OO is changing the color of the publishing info to blue.
I change it to black. but when I save it the color switches to blue!!
It is driving me crazy!!!
Any ideas?? Thanks!!
Pat
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