[Libreoffice-ux-advise] [Bug 90068] FORMATTING Proposal to make italic, bold and other font variants as built-in styles, in addition to emphasis and strong emphasis, which are not obvious to inexperienced people and have different actions, particularly in export targets like LaTeX.

[bugzilla-daemon at bugs.documentfoundation.org]

https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=90068

--- Comment #7 from Christopher R Lee <chrblee at gmail.com> ---
(In reply to Jean-Francois Nifenecker from comment #6)
> I completely support Regina's comments: a style name should never convey a
> formatting setting name ("bold", "20pt"), but the intend of use for the
> style. So, the 'emphasis' and 'strong emphasis' are correctly named, IMO,
> just like 'quotation' is, etc.
> I agree that some names are not immediately clear to newcomers. They just
> have to learn. In my young years, I had to learn to read and to write. Then
> I had to learn about text processing and styles. Styles are not intuitive,
> they are computing matter and this has to be learnt (and tought) as well. I
> strongly think the tool can't replace a teacher. Never.

The italic font variant is used for other purposes than to provide emphasis.
See for example http://html5doctor.com/i-b-em-strong-element/. It needs to be
available without prejudice to or confusion with the intended meaning of the
emphasis style. As others have mentioned, other font variants are in the same
situation; I don't think the user should have to create appropriate styles. I
don't know if a workaround would be to rename generic uncommitted built-in
styles, so the user can take advantage of the variants of the particular
font(s) in use.

Note that in standard typographical practice, 'emphasis' may give italic in a
passage in roman, and roman in a passage in italic; it's a switch. See for
example https://fr.sharelatex.com/learn/Bold,_italics_and_underlining. In LaTeX
you can obtain this effect by using *both* \textit and \emph; items like figure
legends are already in italic so you just use \emph. 

It seems that the <i> element is beginning to be deprecated in html, with a
recommendation to use classes to indicate the intended meaning. The present
correspondence may draw attention to a related though presentational difficuly
with LO. In my opinion, the tabbed windows way of presenting LO styles is an
obstacle both in general and in the present context. A CSS lookalike would be
better and (though not relevant here) it would show the cascading.
Alternatively built-in fonts (at least) could be presented in a tabular format,
so the user can see at a glance how all relevant style names are linked to
variants of the font being used, with a warning if a variant is being generated
artificially.

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