Subject: Re: Upcoming releases
From: Jeffry Smith (smith@missioncriticallinux.com)
Date: Tue Feb 13 2001 - 10:34:56 CST
Randy Kramer said:
> Pierre gave a brief but accurate answer (AFAIK), but I thought I'd
> expand just a little. In many ways this is like features that exist in
> many other text formatting programs. You may want different parts of
> your document formatted in different ways. You can define a style which
> is not indented, is 11 point Arial, single spaced, an extra blank line
> after (and/or before) the paragraph, etc. You may have different styles
> for each level of heading, for footnotes, lines (paragraphs) in the ToC,
> etc. Now you just turn on that style and type (or after typing, go back
> and select the desired paragraphs and apply the desired style).
One nice thing that Styles can (theoretically) give you is that you can change
the style, depending on the output. Example: You define something as a
Heading1. Now, on printout (postscript), you want that Arial, 22 Point,
Underlined, starting new page. For HTML, you want it H1 (i.e. let their
browser define it), and starting a new html file. Associated with the HTML is
a cascading style sheet that says H1 is serif, +6 font. You could define
another one for palm doc format. Thus, by separating the content / structure
(this string of text is a heading-1) from the display (postscript, on-screen,
web, palm, etc). This is actually the goal of SGML / XML.
One thing to consider (post-1.0) would be to make one option for the abiword
file something like a .tar.gz containing the .abw of the file, and a
"recommended" stylesheet (I know WinZip handles .tar.gz files, as well as
Unix. Don't know about other systems).
>
> Word also lets you create stylesheets (that's what they were called
> before the Windows versions of Word -- now the equivalent is templates,
> although a template is a little more and slightly different). Anyway,
> the point here is that if you have the same named styles on several
> different stylesheets, you can change the entire appearance of a
> document by displaying a different style sheet.
Templates should be "standard" documents, in my mind, separate from
stylesheets. There may be commonality, though, in that you may want to change
templates to change such things as header images, etc.
>
> Word lets you assign keyboard shortcuts to styles so you can easily
> switch / apply them while you are typing.
>
> On Word's standard toolbar, they include a drop down menu (combo box).
> It normally displays the current style (name) at the location of the
> cursor. If text comprising several different styles is selected, this
> is shown blank. You can drop down the menu to apply a different style
> to the selected text (or for text that you are about to type).
>
> Word allows you to create named paragraph and character styles. I
> should explain how they interact, but I will have to think about that.
> Maybe someone else can quickly explain that.
>
> On a slightly different point, within a paragraph with a named style,
> you can apply extra style attributes, like applying bold or italic to a
> specific word or phrase. This text still has the underlying named style
> that the original paragraph has, so that is the named style that is
> shown in the drop down menu even if, for example, the entire paragraph
> is selected.
Hm. Need to think about this. Seems to me the easiest way is some kind of
cascading style sheet (similar to how XHTML works).
>
> And, this makes me realize that the drop down menu only shows paragraph
> styles, not character styles (I think).
>
> Hope this helps! Maybe someone else can clarify the fuzzy points, or I
> can after some more thought.
> Randy Kramer
>
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