[Libreoffice-ux-advise] [Bug 50699] Template Changer: Allow ability to change a document' s associated template

https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=50699

--- Comment #55 from Paul <pbpublic@gmail.com> ---
Hi guys,

This is an important feature for me. IIUC, there seems to be some controversy
over what changing the underlying document template should do.

The current LO scheme, of asking to update Styles only, is to my mind the
correct one. Content built into a template is never written over an existing
document, only styles are.

So then, what's the need of changing the underlying template? So that a
document's styles can stay synced with a template of choice.

The current problem comes when a document is radically changed. For instance, I
recently took a long document and changed it from a normal 8.5x11 page to a
2-up 5.5x8.5 mirrored book format, and chose an inverted color scheme for
readability. Virtually all the styles were affected, and now I dare not sync
that document to its original template, which it is stuck with. I want to
assign a "graybook" template to it, but cannot. Any improvements I make to my
graybook template cannot be carried over to any document not bearing its formal
lineage.

The alternative, I guess, would be to copy/paste all document contents to a
blank "graybook" document and resave, but I'm not sure all content, such as
foot/endnotes, would make the transition. Something that radical, IMO, should
not be necessary.

So the issue of changing templates, in my mind, is about Styles, and nothing
more. Themes is a related but subtly different concept, whereby a document's
text styles can be quickly changed, with visual feedback on the fly, without
affecting page settings. We can approximate this by use of different templates,
but Themes makes the function much more accessible, IME.

My vote would be that this is core functionality. It could be done in several
ways, but I think the most intuitive would be at the Manage Templates dialog,
where an "Apply Template to Current Document" command could be added.

BW

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