[Libreoffice-bugs] [Bug 133439] Character styles break Find and replace using attributes Font+size

[bugzilla-daemon at bugs.documentfoundation.org]

https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=133439

--- Comment #3 from Mike Kaganski <mikekaganski at hotmail.com> ---
Generally the F&R needs much love.

I suppose that there could be two alternative ways to improve the situation.
One would be to make attribute search find any attribute applied to the
character, regardless on which level that formatting is applied.

Another would be to expand style search to allow searching for different kinds
of styles (not only paragraph, but also character, list, ...), and then to
explicitly mark attribute search as "search for direct formatting".

The first option might seem more intuitive at first; but I suppose that it goes
in wrong direction - against the ideas around which LibreOffice is built.

The "proper" way to work with Writer is *using styles*. Style is some *named*
set of formatting; and the details of formatting themselves are not as
important as the fact that some parts of content bear that style. User might
mark some text "quotation", another "heading", yet another "note" or "code
snippet", etc. And it's that *semantical* meaning that is most important from
the document structure point of view, that makes this electronic document
easily maintainable, consistently formatted, etc.

Carefully using styles, user mostly doesn't need to search for formatting:
whenever user decides that their quotations need not only be italicized, but
also indented or have borders, user just finds the style name in the list, and
modifies the style definition, thus making document-wide change, having all
parts using the definition looking consistently without touching each part
individually.

On the other hand, user might look for formatting mostly when that formatting
is *not* part of carefully styled document - i.e., when the formatting is
applied directly. E.g., user might want to look for bold text (that they used
for, say, headings), and replace that with a different font name and size. F&R
dialog is the only way to automatize the task for direct formatting case. But
of course, you see how that may become dangerous, if your document also
contains parts of bold text used for emphasizing something...

Simply allowing users to search for "bold applied not only directly, but also
using character style" would most probably emphasize the *wrong* philosophy of
working on documents: e.g., finding "bold" (from style) and applying "non-bold
italic" (as direct formatting) using F&R would make the document a mess of
direct formatting over styles ... something to be discouraged.

But not allowing to search for styles is also bad. My preferred solution thus
would be to separate searching for character styles (by name, not by "bold"),
and marking attribute search as "direct formatting only" for clarity.

Of course, instead of searching for styles in F&R (or in addition to that), an
option could be useful to right-click a style in F11 panel, and "select all
occurrences" from context menu (a topic unrelated to this bug though).

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