Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 40885
preset content in styles
Last modified: 2013-02-07 22:40:43 UTC
I'm adding this to 'framework' because I think the ideas would be useful in all apps, not just the WP. Please re-apply as you see fit. I've come across several ideas lately that lead me to suggest the idea of 'styles' be enhanced to include pre-set textual content. 1. Page styles, header and footer content. ------------------------------------------- Page styles make it relatively easy to control things like header and footer visibility, but the contents still have to be edited in the main page. How about providing the ability to embed the text of headers and footers - "page n of N", 'Chapter N', and other text+field combinations in the style. So when someone selects a page style all this stuff is inserted without additional actions. A preset watermark would be an interesting extension of the idea as well. This would be very helpful in large organisations where style rules cover not just the layout of pages but the standardised content as well. 2. Boilerplate in paragraph styles ------------------------------------ see http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=16092 There are two possible ideas here, and both bear thinking about. 2.1 Text as bullets - an uneditable string that is outdented before the paragraph starts. 2.2 Boilerplate contents - editable text that is pre-inserted when a paragraph style is inserted. 3. Boilerplate in caption styles ---------------------------------- When a caption is inserted in an illustration, the word "illustration" is inserted and hence appears in the index unless it is edited in each instance. There appears to be no way to enter a different word in this position, and I think it perfectly reasonable that the author ought to be able to choose in advance what word is inserted here. The layout of these captions ought to be selectable as a style, including the relative placement of the prefix, the number, the method of numbering, and the individual title. http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=16049 for what provoked these thoughts. 4. Watermark style to include content -------------------------------------- It would be interesting to have a box for default contents of a watermark style 5. Captions in frames ----------------------- A frame style could include a default to insert a caption? It is possible that the ideas in 2. and 3. could be generalisable and applied to all styles - controls for uneditable prefixes (and postfixes), editable boilerplate text, pre-determined index marking, field insertion and numbering control. The ideas in 2 could alternatively be addressed 'from the other end' with an 'insert boilerplate' menu item, that picked preset paragraphs from elsewhere. They would, of course, be suscpetible to styles, but the style would not be the method of introducing the content. That would not address the other ideas, however. I will leave matters of detail to folks cleverer than I.
TM->requirements: Please have a look.
Further thoughts: AA: why is there no 'Document style' at the top of the hierarchy? BB: What about a concept of a 'Section' style, consisting of multiple pages? CC: Watermarks. The more I read the forums, the more trouble people are having with watermarks. Large imnages that prevent the selection of other objects nominally in front, Watermarks that don't rotate when page orientation is switched. I come back again to presetting watermark graphics into page styles, perhaps with "convert to greyscale" and "grey by nn%" options.
I'd like to return to this one again. The more I think about things like the caption texts, the more I think they should be part of the style. And, like everything else in a style, subject to global change. The proposed boilerplate text should not be inserted from the style, it should just appear to have been inserted. So when you edit the style all the instances of it alter, just like other style based parameters.
*** Issue 40885 has been confirmed by votes. ***
6. Graphics style ------------------- One organisation I work for uses a small version of the logo as a bullet for chapter headings, and another for subheadings. At the moment these are embedded multiple times in documents. They cannot be linked to an external file, much as I want to, as the documents are sometimes sent to other readers. This proposal is equivalent to an internal link I would like to propose a 'graphics style' that would allow a single image to be embedded in the document and repeated any number of times. This would save space, and allow for central updating when the design changes (e.g. at Christmas, when we put snow on the icon). A similar technique would help people who use icons for things like action points in lists etc. Imagine a spreadsheet with icons in the cells and =graphics(B2) style formulae to select and repeat them.
I have recently come across issue 64014. I suspect that external style sheets are a way forward for many items, and would like to see that sort of flexibility combined with the proposal here. I am still wedded to the idea of styles-with-content
Created attachment 44201 [details] Sample document with Additional Style and Table of contents
I still think that having styles-with-content is a valid idea, and commend this idea as both product differentiation and for OOo 4. The idea of external style sheets still appeals as well. ('live templates')