Interest in Styles Inspector and Styles Highlighter for GSoC

[Shivam Kumar Singh]

Hi Mike, Tomaz, all,

So basically the “Highlighter” will show all the paragraph styles and
character styles that have been applied in the document and will highlight
their relevant sections, whereas the “Inspector” will give an overview of
all the properties at the point where our cursor is.
But in both we are mostly focusing on the Paragraph and Character styles.
There can be page, frame, list styles too. Should we not consider them ?

In Writer if given two different texts having different font properties
then on clicking on the texts the “Character Styles” on the side pane,
“Font Size” on the top bar and other properties changes w.r.t the property
applied for that font. Somehow if we could assemble this changing property
together then making the “Inspector” won’t be very difficult.

Regarding the placing, for the “Highlighter” I think adding another tab in
the Styles side pane would be a good option as we could use more space
here, and it would be a cleaner approach. For “Inspector” a new window
could be a good option.
What do you think ?

Also for the various styles like “Headings” or “Default”, as Mike had
pointed we will need to collapse/expand the menus, for that we can use
DropDown box. Something like
https://opengrok.libreoffice.org/xref/core/sfx2/source/inc/templdgi.hxx?r=ddf96414#93
This implementation seems a bit complex , perhaps there is a more standard
implementation I don't know about.

Please give me a few more insights and also some bugs closely related these
projects which you think I must solve before beginning the project.

sincerely,
Shivam Kumar Singh

On Fri, 28 Feb 2020 at 00:21, Mike Kaganski <mikekaganski at hotmail.com>
wrote:

> Hi!
>
> On 2020-02-27 21:20, Shivam Kumar Singh wrote:
> > My name is Shivam Kumar Singh a second year student from IIEST Shibpur,
> > India. I am highly interested in the LO code base and would like to
> > contribute to it in GSoC 2020. I have been working on EasyHacks for
> > about some months now and have recently got an InterestingHack merged.
> > Please have a look at my contributions
> > here  https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/q/owner:shivamhere247%2540gmail.com
>
> Thank you!
>
> > For GSoC I am interested in "Styles Inspector" and "Styles Highlighter"
> > project. The purpose of the project is to understand the layout of any
> > document. There's a lot of formatting done in Character Styles, Page
> > styles which changes the appearance and we want them at one place so
> > that its easier for the user to learn the changes. I went through
> > Heiko's blog and wanted to discuss some things with you. The Inspector
> > basically gives an overview of all the formatting done in text whereas
> > Highlighter tells us about all "in the document what styles are
> > applied". I didn't understand this part. We are not talking about
> > Character or Paragraph styles as we are handling them in the Inspector.
> > Are we talking about page styles here ?
>
> To the contrary, we are talking about Character / Paragraph styles here.
> The "Highlighter" is intended as kind of "color map" that allows you to
> see *where* are the bounds of differently-formatted parts of text, while
> "Inspector" should show you which are the specific properties applied at
> a given *point* (cursor position) coming from various levels.
>
> > Also there's a part of Direct Formatting in the Style Inspector, which
> > overrides both Character and Paragraph Styles, So Basically what we are
> > viewing currently in the document is the Direct Formatted Style and all
> > other applied styles have been overshadowed. If so don't you think there
> > should be more options like Indent or Alignment in Direct Formatting
> > Column too ?
>
> Of course every level should show every applied setting (it might
> require collapsing/expanding to be manageable).
>
> > Currently I am focusing on the Styles Inspector part. I would be great
> > if we could discuss it furthur.
> > My nick on IRC is shivam_.
>
> Great; you know how to communicate there :-) But I suppose that
> high-level decisions would be best discussed here on mailing list, to
> not be lost in the short IRC memory :-)
>
>
> --
> Best regards,
> Mike Kaganski
>
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