[Libreoffice-ux-advise] LO's styles are more confusing then MSO's (Was Re: some thoughts on the Sidebar)

[Mirek M.]

Hi Jean,

On Thu, Sep 19, 2013 at 7:07 AM, Jean-Francois Nifenecker <
jean-francois.nifenecker at laposte.net> wrote:

> Hi Mirek,
>
> Le 18/09/2013 23:15, Mirek M. a écrit :
> >
> > Keep in mind that I
> > encourage use of hard formatting for things like bold/italicize.
>
> OMG ! /o\
>
> If someone from the dev team promotes such an odd behaviour, I guess
> that trainers have a looooong way to go in order to make users adopt
> styles <sigh>
>

I'm not from the dev team.

>
> I really can't understand why LibO (and any Libresoftware office suite)
> don't emphasize on what actually make the difference with the other
> office suite(s) : a consistent set of styles (well, quite enough even
> though this may be enhanced).
>

I'm not against styles, but there are usability issues that need to be
solved before people can use them day-to-day. They certainly shouldn't be
forced on people.

>
> As an exercise, just do the following:
> 1. Open Writer
> 2. Insert the dummy Autotext (TEX in FR)
> 3. Set a few words or single chars as bold
>
> Now to the question: how can you set the bolded items above to italics
> quickly and efficiently?
> Now imagine this single paragraph text is a whole 50 pages report.
>

As an experiment, I copied over the contents of
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasmodium_falciparum_biology into
LibreOffice, which came to about 100 pages.
To set the bolded items to italics:
Open Find and Replace (Ctrl+H).
Click "More Options", then "Format...".
Select "bold" and close the Format dialog.
Click Find All.
Now you can either apply a character style or just click on Bold in the
toolbar to unbold the items, then on Italicize to italicize the items.

The dialog onlly selects hard-coded bolded items, not styled ones, which
makes it work very much as if one was using character styles, and one can
easily switch them out for such.

>
> -> Direct formatting is evil. Styles are a blessing. And no other tool
> comes to par with LibreOffice for that matter. Let's claim it!
>

I wouldn't say direct formatting is evil, nor would I say that no other
tool comes to par with LibreOffice there.
Frankly, even though Google Drive allows using only 9 styles, all built-in
paragraph styles, I enjoy working with styles much more in Drive than in
LibreOffice. It all has to do with the UX side of the things, and
LibreOffice needs to work on that if it wants to convert users.


> --
> Jean-Francois Nifenecker, Bordeaux
>
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