[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 #4 from Luke Kendall <luke.kendall at gmail.com> ---
Thanks for all that Mike, but I do understand the appeal of styles.

I feel a few brief points might be worth making, since I understand you're in
the "Strong Styles" camp.

1/
This particular bug argues against such a strict use of styles, as the bug make
it impossible to find text styled exactly for the purpose you describe.  There
is no way to find text marked with Whisper style, and that text only.

2/
Secondly, the "strong styles" position refuses to acknowledge that there are
two kinds of users - one class who format their documents according to styles
(whether they know it or not), such as for HTML.  But not just for HTML:
there's a large class of use cases where style markup is essential/important
for good text management, and many workflows based on that.

But a second class of user is more casual.  For them, they are NOT making
semantic distinctions and do not want to.  The surface appearance is all that
matters.  In my view, Writer takes a very hard stance that such a use case is
not supported, and is in fact an erroneous use of Writer. (The user is an idiot
and should do things the way we want them to.  Even when that will slow them
down and make their work take longer.)

I can understand the appeal of such a hard line stance, but I think it's a big
failure of UX, to reject a large class of users.

3/
>From my experience with Writer, it seems there's a designed-in assumption that
every new use of a style applied by direct formatting is a potentially new and
unique piece of semantic markup.  I believe this is an extreme position to
take, especially in longer documents.  The idea that a document could have
thousands of different kinds of semantic markup is theoretically possible, but
an extreme edge case.

I think the issue could be largely resolved by having one extra option that
could be enabled: Minimise Style Creation. In this mode, if a style was exactly
the same as one used before, then a (possibly auto-generated if it's new) style
name is used.  All direct formatting would then be gone.

4/
Although I think from this you can see my viewpoint is quite different from
yours, I really don't expect to be able to change your opinion.

5/
I did have a little look around for alternative word processors for Linux. 
>From my perspective, LO or maybe OOo are still by far the best options for most
use cases, including mine.  Unfortunately the areas where Writer opposes me and
makes my life VERY difficult are quite substantial too.

Perhaps half of those difficulties are simply caused by bugs, and some of them
are fixed quickly (sadly, others stay for long, long years).

Even though it may sound like I'm ungrateful, I'm really not.  The only serious
alternative would be to run Microsoft Office and that brings its own problems,
possibly even larger.

You and all the other contributors in the open source community have done (and
are doing) a magnificent job of producing such a powerful and well-managed
piece of software. That it's not perfect, is something I can live with.

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