Robin Laing wrote:
The formatting at a particular point in a document is what the issue
is. I have tried to use styles to clean up imported documents with
limited success. I could use an XML editor to find some of the tokens
(pointers or whatever you want to call the XML property coding) that
indicate the formatting. But that defeats the purpose of using OOo as a
word processor. If I want to go to that level, I could just use LaTeX
as many around work here do.
After thinking about this overnight, I would like to see a dialog box
that reveals the details of the formatting at the cursor location. Not
something that you have to search through mutilple windows but a simple
dialog box that can display the various styles used.
Page style: xxx
Paragraph style: xxx
Character style: xxx
Frame style: xxx
List style: xxx
Font: xxx
Font style: xxx
What is displayed on the screen, or printed, is formatted by the low
level formatting attributes of each of these objects, not necessarily
that of the base style of the object which may have been modified. A
user may have taken an entire document formatted in the Times Roman
font, done a CTRL-A, and changed the font to Garamond with direct
formatting. That the paragraph style at a particular point is still
"Default" and that the default style uses "Times Roman" doesn't effect
the fact that the font in the actual paragraph is set to "Garamond".
Users who avoid styles do this all the time, in every word processor.
This is basically what Reveal codes offers with the added effect feature
of being able to edit within the reveal code box. As I said earlier,
when you import multiple formatted documents, highliting and changing
the style doesn't always work, and in my experience, hardly works.
It doesn't work if the user has overlaid the base style of an object
with customized direct formatting attributes, which is so often the case.
Accordingly if you want to see the actual attributes at a particular
point in text, look at Format -> Page to see all the settings in the
page dialog box, look at Format -> Paragraph to see all the settings in
the Paragraph setttings dialog box, and see Format -> Characters to see
the character attributes at that point in the text. Don't look at the
style applied, which has likely been overwritten.
The shear number of attributes applied at a single point is presumably
why there there is not a dialog box with single listing of all
attributes. Mostly a user is only concerned with one or more attributes
at any one time in any case, that is, if you are dealing with character
attributes, you mostly want to get that fixed, before going on to the
issue of line spacing.
In most cases, I cannot think of any formatting before the document is
completed as I have no idea what will be included until much later. This
is common where I work. Many people pulling information from many
sources.
Yes, this can be a mess, but is not more so or less so in any particular
Word Processor.
I would love a way to see when the properties of the document
change as I move a cursor through the document. Find out how that
imported document displays all the text like t
h
i
s
.
In theory you should be able to check the current cell formatting, table
formatting and paragraph formatting and character formatting and figure
out what is going on here, being sure first to turn on "Enabled for
Asian languages" and "Enabled for complex text layout" in Tools ->
Options... -> Language settings -> Languages which makes some further
attribute possibilities visible, attribute possibilities which may have
been set by the conversion filter.
The real difficulty, as I see it, is that currently, OOo Writer is not
supposed to be able to do this at all. Probably the filter conversion is
accessing wrongly a stackup attribute which should not yet be used as
still too buggy. You have almost certainly uncovered a bug that should
be reported as such if you can find the time.
I feel that OOo has the ability with the inclusion of a styles indicator
box that could display the properties for the particular point that the
cursor is at. Add in the ability to go to the individual styles used at
that point, would provide almost the same functionabilty as Reveal Codes
within the framework of styles. It doesn't change the usage or
programming of OOo or the whole styles concept but provides a new and
powerful tool for the users. Making OOo better.
Although I think a single scrolling dialog box would show too much at
one time for common, I fully agree that a dialog box with a scrolling
table of this kind would be very useful in special cases for showing
every attribute applicable to the current cursor position or current
selection when you did want that. The concrete example where cell table
font direction, character direction, text direction and so forth may all
be involved is one such case.
Jallan
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