[libreoffice-design] Templates, styles, outline and bullets/numbering

Hi,

I believe Writer's template, style, outline and numbering facilities are in 
need of a rethink. The areas I think are weak, and this is by no means a full 
list, are:
- The template organiser dialogue - who knows how to use it and what it's 
really for?
- Style management - setting defaults, selecting style-sheets with some idea 
of the stylistic/visual impact, changing styles
- Style usage - must become solid, robust and consistent. The impossibility of 
getting working single type or mixed type (numbered or bulletted) outline 
lists must be solved! At the moment, there seem to be three or four ways to 
control list hierarchies and only some (or one)  of them work. They are using 
the tab key, using the increase/decrease indent button, using the list or 
numbering styles or using the bullets and numbering's outline view. They each 
break the others in an unpredictable way!

I think the user stories that press on the issues are something like:

1/ As a document writer, I want to ensure my document is easy to read because 
all the paragraphs, headers and lists are consistent in their style and 
outline level, according to their position in the document hierarchy. 

You can probably tell from this that I think we should strive to make styles 
and outline levels so easy to use (while not diminishing their full 
capabilities) that users predominantly use styles and not the ad-hoc editing 
methods that render most docs inconsistent and difficult to read.

2/ As a document writer, I want to be able to very easily select a style-sheet 
to change the look of my document, so I have a good idea of how the new style-
sheet will look before I select it and I should not have to do much custom 
editing to get a style I like.

3/As a style-sheet writer or modifier, I want to see a style-sheet view of the 
world, that shows the hierarchy of styles and their setting inheritance and 
overrides, so that I can easily build and maintain a simple and logical style-
sheet

e.g. style settings inheritance and override hierarchy (This indented text 
illustrates the hierarchy, not a design ;o)

-- Default (All settings, including outline levels)
                --Paragraph text (overridden or new settings)
                --Heading (overridden or new settings)
                        --Heading1 (overridden or new settings)
                        --Heading2 (overridden or new settings)
                        --Heading3 (overridden or new settings)
                --Header (overridden or new settings)
                        --FirstPageHeader (overridden or new settings)
                        --LeftHeader (overridden or new settings)
                        --RightHeader (overridden or new settings)
                --Footer (overridden or new settings)
                        --FirstPageFooter (overridden or new settings)
                        --LeftFooter (overridden or new settings)
                        --RightFooter (overridden or new settings)
                --List (overridden or new settings)
                        --BulletList1 (overridden or new settings)
                        --NumberList1 (overridden or new settings)
                        --BulletList2 (overridden or new settings)
                        --NumberList2 (overridden or new settings)
                        --BulletList3 (overridden or new settings)
                        --NumberList3 (overridden or new settings)

4/As a style-sheet writer or modifier, I want to lock a style-sheet to a 
document template, so that only that style-sheet can be used, so the documents 
produced are consistent.

(personally, I'd like to see a way to lock out custom edits for selected doc 
templates too, for complete document consistency and compatibility - this is 
especially powerful for collaboratively authored docs)

Aside from the implicated UI redesign, I think an extensive and professional 
set of style-sheets would greatly help matters.

Any thoughts?

Cheers,

Greg

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