Re: [libreoffice-users] Styles and keyboard shortcuts: best practices?

Le 2011-03-19 10:18, Ryan Jendoubi a écrit :
> Hi all,
>
> Would like your opinion on the following.
>
> When I'm make styles for a new template, I always create New styles, 
> usually with a common prefix in the name, to avoid some hypothetical 
> namespace conflict in the future, e.g. when copying or including parts 
> from one document to another.
>
> I'm always wondering though whether it wouldn't be better to just 
> modify the Default styles instead of creating new ones? So for 
> example, instead of having an "Essay Para" style in Essay.ott and 
> "Notes Para" in Classnotes.ott, just modify "Text Body" or something 
> in each template to what I want the standard paragraph style to be for 
> that template.
>
> The possible utility of this has just occurred to me now I've started 
> fussing around with keyboard shortcuts for styles. Since shortcuts are 
> saved in LibreOffice (or at least in Writer) as opposed to along with 
> Templates or with individual documents, if I set a shortcut for e.g. 
> "Essay Para" for use with my Essay template, that shortcut key is 
> useless for working in any other template that doesn't have the "Essay 
> Para" style.
>
> All my programming genes tell me to avoid namespace conflicts, inherit 
> and specialise, etc. And there other way of getting around the problem 
> above is to say that keyboard customisations in LibreOffice Writer 
> ought to be saved with the Template somehow, as opposed to being 
> universal. I certainly think there's something to be said for that.
>
> What do y'all think? How do you manage and apply your templates and 
> styles effectively?
>
> -- Ryan

I see advantages with both approaches.

As far as I am concerned, I stay with standard style names and have 
added a few of my own where the style sheet is lacking. But in most 
cases, I either write letters and documents from scratch – in which case 
my standard style sheet works best – or I write a very long document or 
a family of shorter documents (ex.: a series of information sheets), in 
which case I create a style sheet, fine-tune the first document and 
"save as" to do the other ones.

I like my approach for two reasons.
1. As you say, my shortcuts and style names are standard. I start with a 
Header 1, continue with Body Text and a few Header 3/4 within the text, 
so it's very easy to do ctl-3 (to get a header) and have it followed 
automatically by a standard paragraph (ctl-0).
2. I often borrow text from other documents or from my colleagues (with 
permission). In that situation, what was formatted as body text using 
Calibri 10-pt in one document automatically comes properly formatted as, 
say, New Century 9-pt in the other document, with minimal reformatting 
to do. I could paste without formatting, but I would loose header 
markings in the original text. Besides "complex" formatting codes would 
be lost: when I paste without formatting, new line marks are converted 
as new paragraphs, hard spaces (useful in many French punctuation marks) 
are converted as standard spaces, and so on.

On the other hand, if you want your text to always stay styled the same 
way, even when you copy it into other documents, then use 
document-specific style names.

All that being said, I find one compelling reason to use style names 
that are NOT the default style names: if you routinely export your 
documents in Word format. LibreOffice exports fairly well to the doc 
format. But there are a few format inconsistencies and most of them are 
related to default style names (at least between French versions of 
OpenOffice, LibreOffice and Microsoft Office 2003). For instance, the 
"heading" style is converted with the tabs defined in Word and default 
bullet styles are converted strangely.



P.S. I would love LibreOffice to come with no pre-defined styles (or at 
least with very few basic ones), so I would have only the styles I want, 
defined how I want them and I would have only those. I would remove 
especially the 40 bullet and numbering styles that appear as paragraph 
styles, especially considering there also are many bullet styles and 
character styles.

--

Michel Gagnon – michel@mgagnon.net <mailto:michel@mgagnon.net>
Montréal (Québec, Canada) – mgagnon.net <http://mgagnon.net>


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