Robin Laing wrote:
If you ran into the problems that I have, then this wouldn't be
classified as overkill. It is the same problem with MS Word as well,
not just OOo.
Not at all. I have converted problem problem documents to MS Office. I
still won't want one enormous dialog box covering a large portion of the
screen.
Not very productive when working on large documents created from mutiple
sources.
Search & Replace can sometimes be much more productive with large
documents than going through manually attempting to look at formatting.
Find it and change it all at once.
Perhaps separate tool bars for page formatting, paragraph formatting,
and character formatting would be better, and separate tool bars for
each of the five style panels. You could bring all the tool bars up if
you wanted. You probably wouldn't want to very often.
The Active Styles feature does help here, but it doesn't' display where
the changes take place with respect to the text.
Come on. Most you can *see* that.
My wife uses NeoOffice on her Mac. FWIW, she wants a RC code feature as
well. She has the same headaches of multiple imported formats to get
into one nice document. Sometimes hundreds of pages in size. Moving a
cursor character to character to find where the formatting has changed
has been enough to cause her to scream.
Again, can't you mostly "see" where it changes?
I agree here and this is the issue with people that are moving from WP
to OOo, sometimes because they don't have a choice. Adding a function
to OOo that makes it more functional to those users, even if it isn't
the same as RC but also a tool that would help other users should never
be frowned on.
Not so, for any application. Every new addition to any application means
more to maintain and more to debug. Every enhancement that developers
work on means that they aren't working on many other possible enhancements.
One can't have everything. There have to be priorities. And different
users honestly *have* different priorities, as do developers.
Again, this is important. This is why the lines are so divided on this
issue. My priorities are way different than those that only write for a
living. I write as a very small part of my job. I very very rarely
create original documents. I am normally stuck with either repairing
crashed MS Office documents or combining pieces from so many different
sources and formats. Many that get imported in weird and wonderful
ways. I will say that things have been much better with OOo 2.0 on this
front.
I understand this. My work is somewhat similar.
But complaining about the current interface or abilities of the tool you
"must" use doesn't help. If your particular suggestion was accepted by
OOo developers, it almost certainly not be implemented before OOo 3.0 in
any case.
The immediate solution is to learn to use OOo Writer better using the
abilities it has, perhaps with the addition of macros that appear geared
to solving problems you regularly encounter.
And these can be hard to find. A RC style viewer or at least reveal
formatting points may make life much better in these cases for people
like me.
Most changes between formats are not hard to find. Just look at the screen.
Your the type of person that causes me headaches. When I import a
document, I sometimes have to remove some of the formatting or insert
text within this formatting and spend time trying to figure out what
went wrong. Now this is where RC would indicate that there was a change
for that space.
Why do you even have to know? If this space looks fine, leave it.
Otherwise simply use Ctrl-Shft-Space to remove direct formatting from
anything that looks add and see what happens.
I tried the non-printing character suggestion and it will work if the
changes are obvious enough. That is an interesting suggestion but you
have to either have your zoom up enough or very keen eyes, better than
mine. :) Now if there was a figure that showed that there was a
formatting change, much better.
I am astounded that you do not almost always have nonprinting characters
active. That's probably part of your difficulty. After all, should you
not want to see at least those few formatting tokens that do exist in
OOo Writer?
So if you make such an error, press CTRL-Z, move back or forward one
space, and insert your text again. Then fix the space also if you want.
This is hardly worth fussing over. You don't have to know or care what
the wrong formatting was. Just fix it and move on.
But I didn't do this, undo won't work for me. I received the document
from someone else.
Then just fix the problem by overwriting the text in the wrong
formatting with the correct formatting.
You are obviously having problems. So provide details of one at least
of the problems, not undetailed references to things that don't work
the way you are trying to make them work. The interface you describe
won't help in such matters, as it still wouldn't show anything that is
not seeable now by looking at the formatting dialog boxes for the
current object.
The example I have used is verticle text in an imported document. I
spent two or three days trying to get it sorted out. I never did. I
ended up having to use Word.
But that seems to have been a bug, not something that any revelation of
applied properties would have aided with, since OOo Writer is
purportedly not capable of displaying text in vertically stacked format.
And another that I have is "Flashing Text" The style is Header 1 which
is used many times in this document. This is the only one that
flashes. Now I do know that the author has used allot of direct
formatting within this document because if I apply the Header 1 style,
it will change the look of line. This is where a different style should
have been used. Now if I could only fully reformat the document. Not
an option though.
What is the problem?
Do all headers that should be at that level blink?
Then triple-click on a current header that blinks which shows as being
in the Header 1 style but is otherwise in the format you want these
headers to be in. Use Format -> Characters... -> Font Effects to turn
the blinking off for that header. Make any other font formatting changes
you might want. Keep the modified header selected. In the Stylist, in
the paragraph styles, select Header 1 (which should already be
selected). In the drop down menu that comes from the small arrow at the
end of the Stylist toolbar, select "Update style".
The Header 1 style attributes will be updated to match the selected text
and all text in the document in the Header 1 style should now show this
new formatting, that is, they should appear exactly as they did, but
without the blinking (if, in fact, they were actually all directly
formatted identically in the document as you received it).
And you no longer have any direct formatting in your Header 1 headers.
they match exactly the Header 1 style.
You can also fix this in a non-structural fashion by doing a Find &
Replace to "Find All" text in Header 1 style, and then turn off the
blinking in Format -> Characters... -> Font Effects through direct
formatting, turning it off for all the found text at once.
You don't have to know what particular attributes are set in some text
to either modify a style to be just like it or to create a new style
just like it. If someone has produced a document using direct formatting
throughout, it usually not very difficult to move the direct formatting
choices for various headers into the appropriate header styles definitions.
I do agree but the Reveal Codes has been brought up so many times over
the years.
I have messages from 2003 on this. The RC issue was created in
2002-Mar-07.
Of course. People always want whatever they liked in old software to be
carried over into new software, including myself. But they can't always
get this and there are sometimes good reasons why not.
Jallan
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