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

[Francois Tigeot]

Hi Regina, all,

On Tue, Jul 05, 2011 at 07:16:44PM +0200, Regina Henschel wrote:
> Francois Tigeot schrieb:
> >On Tue, Jul 05, 2011 at 05:42:43PM +0200, Regina Henschel wrote:
> 
> 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'm not sure what do you mean here. Would it be impossible to save
text and paragraph styles in an .odp file because the storage format
is not specified ?
This shouldn't preclude work to be done in Impress proper to add support
for them IMHO.

> >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.

This is not clear either: I specifically want to use different styles for
different paragraphs. What object are you speaking of ? The "master page" ?

In Writer it is possible to define different paragraph styles and use
them in the same page of text: titles, subtitles, citations, etc...

> >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.

Well, that's what I'm trying to do here ;-)

> [...] 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?

Since my first mail, I've found out "Presentation styles" are more or less
usable. Howewer, their use is very unintuitive: you have to use the left or
right arrows in the toolbar ("Promote" or "Demote") and cannot simply change
the style of one line of text from the Styles and Formatting window.

The Presentation Styles are also associated with a rigid hierarchy and it
doesn't seem possible to separate the presentation characteristics from the
hierarchy level. How could I define two separate text styles for the "Outline 2"
level (say, one with a red font and one with a blue one) for example ?

-- 
Francois Tigeot