Idea of a "strict" version of LO for publishers

[Heiko Tietze]

Hi Yves,

educating users to work efficiently is also a goal of the design team. However, 
what you have in mind makes Writer kind of a text editor. One paragraph style 
(PS) means no headings, no lists, no citations... besides you miss all other 
style families like page style, character style. And I don't understand why 
nested PS raise problems - most attributes are just inherited and only a few 
change with the derived PS.

What you maybe think about is to avoid direct formatting (DF) - which is covered 
by the "Formatting (Styles)" toolbar [1,2]. You can also customize the UI and 
store this configuration in a template for further adjustments.

The second approach is to give feedback. Assuming users are aware of DF as a 
source of inconsistency, it is not easy to find those places where an attribut 
was set hasty. The Styles Highlighter [3] should solve this problem, and first 
steps for implementation have been made in a GSoC project last year [4].

If you think about some kind of styles checker that inspects the document 
whether it complies with a list of rules I suggest to realize this per macro. 
And do it after writing rather than trying to block the formatting.

If the goal is to have structured text input (that you process later regardless 
of the formatting) I could imagine form controls to be helpful.

Cheers,
Heiko

[1] Implemented for https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=106781
[2] META ticket https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=117022
[3] 
https://design.blog.documentfoundation.org/2019/11/05/proposal-to-conveniently-highlight-and-inspect-styles-in-libreoffice-writer/
[4] 
https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2021/10/19/libreoffice-and-google-summer-of-code-2021-the-results/

On 07.04.22 17:23, Yves Picard wrote:
> Hello,
> On the advice of Sophie Gautier, I would like to tell you about one of our 
> "research and development" projects, for which I have a budget of about two 
> thousand euros. As a university publisher, we maintain electronic publishing 
> channels from word processing to several publishing formats (html, epub, 
> InDesign, PDF), passing through a pivot format in XML TEI. This pivot format is 
> itself derived from an XML export from Libre Office.
> 
> A significant part of our work consists of tracking down and containing 
> artefacts from the word processor (Word or Libre Office), in particular style 
> nesting, automatic styles or language attributes, etc.
> 
> I'm looking to test the idea of a "strict" version of LO that would ensure that 
> one style and one style only is applied to a paragraph, that one enrichment and 
> one enrichment only is applied to a word (no use of styles like "accentuation" 
> for example) or that a web link is always findable despite the style applied. 
> This would probably be an "amnesiac" version of LO (without memory of the 
> various manipulations) which would either be used by authors (difficult to set 
> up) or would be used by the editor by loading an author file in this strict version.
> 
> An alternative (and probably better) idea would be a "big cleaner" tool that 
> would flatten all style or attribute nesting to the author's work.
> 
> I'm looking for an opinion from the Libre Office community on the feasibility of 
> such a development, while being well aware that it goes against the logic of the 
> word processor in some way. But such a version, I believe, would meet the 
> expectations of the publishing world.
> 
> Thank you for your attention,
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Yves Picard,
> Presses universitaires de Rennes,
> France.
> 

-- 
Dr. Heiko Tietze, UX-Designer and UX-Mentor
Tel: +49 30 5557992-63 | Mail: heiko.tietze at documentfoundation.org
The Document Foundation, Kurfürstendamm 188, 10707 Berlin, DE
Gemeinnützige rechtsfähige Stiftung des bürgerlichen Rechts
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