[Libreoffice-ux-advise] [Libreoffice] "Style And Formatting" window

[Regina Henschel]

Hi Francois,

Francois Tigeot schrieb:
> Hi Regina,
>
> On Tue, Jul 05, 2011 at 05:42:43PM +0200, Regina Henschel wrote:
>> Francois Tigeot schrieb:
>> [..]
>>> There's also the matter of Impress: the Style and Formatting module is
>>> completely useless there. New styles can't be created or custom styles
>>> applied to the document.
>>
>> That is wrong. The Style and Formatting window contains not only the
>> presentation styles, but the drawing object styles too. And for them
>> the styles work as in Draw.
>
> It was so obvious for me, I forgot to specify I was talking about text
> styles. I'm working on a mainly text-based presentation and the absence
> of paragraph and character styles is driving me nuts.

I think, here we all agree. Paragraph and character styles are 
desirable. The OOo issue is 
http://openoffice.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=19340, now more than 
seven years old and 22 votes.

>
>>> The inability to use style in Impress is a real turn-down but I'm afraid
>>> the problem is bigger than the developer's list.
>>
>> "Inability" is wrong, but the connection between master page and
>> presentation object style is not obvious and the handling can be
>> improved. To come up with a concept would be a task for UX.
>
> Why not just use the same style mechanism as in Writer ?

Because nobody has implemented it. I see no reason in ODF.

> I can't fathom the fact that there are "character" and "paragraph" dialog
> boxes accessibles from a contextual menu in Impress, but the result
> can not be associated to a global style in the document.

If you have the same setting for all paragraphs in a text, then a style 
is possible. But you cannot have different appearances inside one object 
via style.

>
> Consistency is very important; how can I be sure some categories of text
> (say shell command samples) can have the same formating in all the
> presentation ?
> Did the creators of Impress expect people to take a 80-slide document and
> tediously apply the same changes by hand in half of them, right-clicking the
> mouse 40 times to change the font of one of the text lines ?
>

Use a style. Yes I know, numbering is not contained in graphic styles 
and different presentation styles, which have numbering, need different 
master pages. But font settings work well with styles. Do you have an 
example, where styles do not work for you, besides those where you need 
different settings inside one text?

Kind regards
Regina