Re: [libreoffice-users] styles for plays?

At 09:46 26/06/2013 -0400, Helen Etters wrote:
> I've volunteered to edit a one-time publication of a collection of 
> plays.  The plays came to me in different styles -- three of the 
> plays came to me with all the characters's speaking lines centered 
> -- the characters's names centered a line above.
>
> Some of the writers seem to have centered the names with a centering 
> code -- I can highlight the name and use the "left margin" code to 
> move the name to left margin.  Others
> seem to have centered by spacing over! (yes)  and I have to 
> backspace until I get the name to the left margin.
>
> None used a colon after the speaker, and the publisher wants 
> it.  I've made some progress with Search & Replace --  Search for 
> all incidents of TOM and replace with TOM
> colon space. But the most tedious part is moving TOM from center to 
> left and bring his speaking lines up to begin on the same line.  Is 
> there any way I can put these plays into a style sheet and save this 
> work, or would creating the style sheet take as long as what I'm 
> doing?  I've never used styles.  And this is a one-time job so if I 
> have to do it all by hand, at least it's only once.

In situations like this, it's very often easiest to lose all the 
existing formatting and insert your own from scratch - rather than 
trying to tinker with what you have.  That's very easy to do: just 
use Edit | Paste Special... (or right-click | Paste Special... or 
Ctrl+Shift+V) instead of ordinary Paste, selecting "Unformatted text" 
from the options in the Paste Special dialogue, when inserting your 
material.  Since you will already have done some work on the text, 
you can do this from where you currently are by selecting your entire 
document text, copying it, and pasting it Unformatted either back 
over the original or else into a new document.  (I'd suggest a new 
document, as you might well want to go back and look at how the 
original material *was* formatted, in fact.)

Then you need to learn a few tricks to tidy things up.

You don't need to backspace over a number of spaces.  Put the cursor 
at the start of the line (paragraph, in fact).  Press 
Ctrl+Shift+right arrow.  This will select the range of spaces.  Now 
press Delete to remove them.  You can also use Find & Replace to 
replace space-space with space.  Keep repeating that until there are 
no more double spaces and you will be close to what you need.  (It is 
seldom useful to have consecutive spaces in any word-processed 
document.)  Better still, use Find & Replace to replace ^ + (that's 
circumflex-space-plus sign) with nothing, having clicked More Options 
and ticked "Regular expressions".  This will remove all spaces from 
the start of any paragraph (which is what your relevant lines will 
presumably be).

Perversely, there appears to be no easy way to merge "TOM: " with the 
next paragraph (or if there is, I've managed to forget it): you might 
be left with doing this manually.

Yes, you can create styles to do some of this, but you would still 
have to apply the styles to the relevant parts of the text.  They 
would be more useful if, say, you wanted character names to be a 
different font, size, or style - or perhaps all of these - from the 
surrounding text.  Using a character style to set these would be a 
benefit in various ways: it would be quicker, it would be more 
reliable at ensuring all the text was treated in the same way, and it 
would enable you to change your selected settings later at a 
stroke.  And yes: you could import such styles into any new document 
in the future or put them in an appropriate template.

I trust this helps.

Brian Barker


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