Date: prev next · Thread: first prev next last
2011 Archives by date, by thread · List index


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>


--
Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to users+help@libreoffice.org
List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/www/users/
*** All posts to this list are publicly archived for eternity ***

Context


Privacy Policy | Impressum (Legal Info) | Copyright information: Unless otherwise specified, all text and images on this website are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. This does not include the source code of LibreOffice, which is licensed under the Mozilla Public License (MPLv2). "LibreOffice" and "The Document Foundation" are registered trademarks of their corresponding registered owners or are in actual use as trademarks in one or more countries. Their respective logos and icons are also subject to international copyright laws. Use thereof is explained in our trademark policy.