Re: [libreoffice-users] Paragraph styles

Several of the posts have brought me to thinking a few random thoughts.

1. There's a difference between *using* styles and *creating/editing* them. 
In the LyX/LaTeX world, as well as the HTML/CSS world, one is indeed forced 
to used styles (called "environments" in LaTeX speak) because that's the way 
the system works. The styles/environments are created by supposed experts 
who create document "classes," or templates. But, neither the classes nor 
the environments are easy to modify. The end-user selects the environment he 
wants (\chapter, \section, \quote, etc.) and then lets the program do the 
work. As one writer mentioned, it truly separates the operations of writing 
and typesetting/formatting. Markdown editors in the HTML world also allow 
such clean separation. None of the WYSIWYG word processors (Word, LO, OO, 
AbiWord, etc.) provide such a clean separation between editing and 
formatting. And, yet...

2. In the LyX/LaTeX world, it all works very well...until you want to modify 
a small formatting parameter for a specific paragraph. Yes, it can be done, 
but it's not intuitive, nor encouraged. Despite the advanced formatting 
capabilities of LyX or LaTeX, few writers use them, I believe in part 
because making even a small change from the default settings sometimes 
requires a massive on-line search for the right command to change.

3. In the Word/LO world, this case of the "one off" paragraph modification 
is where I see resistance to styles from end-users. I've got paragraph style 
for just about every possible situation, but there may be a single paragraph 
where a user wants to change one parameter. If the user doesn't understand 
styles, he'll just apply direct formatting to the paragraph, without 
creating and/or modifying a style. Thus, just having users write with 
templates and styles created by others will only take people so far. At some 
point in time, they will need to learn how to create and/or modify styles. 
Otherwise, they'll have documents with a mixture of styles and direct 
formatting, the beginning of what could grow into a mess. I believe AbiWord 
has (or had) a feature to "lock styles" meaning a person could be locked out 
of changing formatting directly. All formatting changes would have to go 
through styles. I'm sure it would be a maddening feature for the 
uninitiated, but it would encourage people to learn to do use styles in the 
"right" way.

4. Document collaboration is a real bugaboo. We lawyers share documents 
repeatedly. I would create a document using styles, and send it off to a 
colleague for further edits. I would get it back with a mess of styles and 
direct formatting. I see no answer to this conundrum, simply because our 
programs allow so many different ways of accomplishing the same tasks, and I 
couldn't expect a colleague to listen to my styles tutorial when all he 
wanted to do was make a small edit to my proposed contract.

5. I agree that LO's styles work much better than Word's. With LO, I can 
list my styles hierarchically, so I can change a parameter in one high level 
style and have it changed in all lower level styles based on the same higher 
style. (So, no, you don't have to change each and every style just to change 
the font throughout a document). Word has styles based on other styles as 
well, but I have yet to find a clean way to list them in the style box in a 
hierarchical manner.

Virgil



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