On 04/30/2013 04:18 PM, Dave Liesse wrote:
As an end user, I'd like to ask one follow-up question to your third
point. This is an "I don't understand" type of question, by the way,
not a challenge.
Are you implying that if I want to, say, indent one paragraph with no
other changes, I should create a new style for that? Seems like a lot
of work since it can be done with one mouse clicks (or, if I ever get
around to learning how to create shortcut keys, one keystroke
combination) plus navigating to the paragraph.
(Just for the record, the indent and outdent keystrokes are probably
the thing I miss most from MS Word, and there's not much that I miss.)
Dave
From a personal perspective,you would not have to create a new
style if you are only going to do this one time. However, if you then
find that you want to do it more often, you probably should create a new
style and use it every time you indent a paragraph this way.
Creating such a style involves these steps: Suppose your paragraph
style is named TextBody. Remember that this also requires the Styles and
Fromatting window open (use the F11 key to open it).
1) Right click TextBody in the Paragraph styles list.
2) Select Modify from the context menu.
3) In the Organizer tab, name this new style (I suggest: TextBody-Indented).
4) Click the Indents & Spacing Tab.
5) Select the amount of the indentation you want in First line.
6) Click OK.
Yes, for me this takes 6 steps. But most of it can be done with a
mouse. Actually, only naming the style requires using the keyboard.
Another point: this new style is identical to the original paragraph
style except for the amount of indentation.
It is really about moderation. It is also about some planning of
what is to be contained in a text document. If you are creating several
paragraphs that have the same format, a style that defines that format
is a good idea. If you have only one or a very few paragraphs that are
different, you might not want to create a style for only a very few
paragraphs.
Having said that, here is a real example that someone asked about
on the OpenOffice.org mailing list several years ago. They were writing
a document that contained two languages. Some of the paragraphs
contained one language, and the rest contained a second language. How
can words in two languages be spell checked?
The answer was to create a paragraph style for one language and a
second paragraph style for the second language. (This requires similar
six steps to what I mentioned above. Step 4 would be to click the Font
tab. Step 5 is to select the language desired.) Since the person had
already installed the dictionaries for these languages, all that was
needed was to assign the proper paragraph style by language. Then to
check the spelling, the F7 key is clicked. Both languages have their
spelling checked.
--Dan
On 4/30/2013 12:40, Virgil Arrington wrote:
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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