Subject: RE: The New Styles
From: Tom Newton (Tom.Newton@gtl.com)
Date: Wed Mar 14 2001 - 10:27:00 CST
Hello all,
I'm normally a bit of a lurker, but I'll put my two cents worth in (from my
Maxwell WP experience). There are two issues here as you seem to see them:
1. "Normal" style paragraph spacing
2. General style changes affecting peoples previously saved documents.
On issue 1 I agree that most newbie users expect to hit return twice to get
a new paragraph, and that the default should be that you have to hit return
twice to get a space between paragraphs.
On issue 2 however, either I'm misunderstanding the thread or you've all got
it slightly wrong. It is my understanding that with most modern word
processors (certainly in Word) the style definitions are saved with
documents, and therefore, the fact that the default styles have changed
shouldn't affect the documents that people have saved. Therefore, _any_
changes to the default set of styles (even the change to the "normal" style)
should not affect documents that people have already saved. In Word for
example, if you change all the default styles, and then receive a document
from someone who hasn't done so, their document still loads and displays
correctly. I think Abiword should match this behaviour, and if it's not
already persisting a set of styles in documents that have been saved, then
this should be implemented before any changes are made to the default set of
styles.
Since this is my first (or maybe second) post (and I haven't looked at the
code), perhaps I'm talking drivel. I'm sure you'll tell me ;)
Tom
unproductive maxwell author
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Randy Kramer [mailto:rhkramer@fast.net]
> Sent: 14 March 2001 13:00
> To: Martin Sevior
> Cc: Sam TH; James Montgomerie; Tomas Frydrych;
> abiword-dev@abisource.com
> Subject: Re: The New Styles
>
>
> I agree with Martin -- delete the extra line spacing, keep the other
> style changes.
>
> Randy Kramer
>
> Martin Sevior wrote:
> >
> > On Wed, 14 Mar 2001, Sam TH wrote:
> > >
> > > This is a potentially serious problem. I agree with
> Jamie that the
> > > line spacing changes are definitely a problem. However,
> in light of
> > > this, I'm sort of ambivalent about the formatting changes. They
> > > certainly look better, and if we had no installed base, I wouldn't
> > > hesitate to support them. However, we do have plenty of
> people with
> > > "legacy" AbiWord documents, and we have to be careful
> about what we do
> > > that changes the behavior of those documents. So, what do people
> > > think?
> > >
> >
> > Like Jamie and 5 other Word users collaborating on a huge I
> don't put an
> > extra space between paragraphs by default. I would rather
> have the extra
> > control of pressing return twice.
> >
> > Also some of my old docs now look weird. So I would vote
> for no extra
> > space for "Normal" mode. However we can keep the other nice
> formatting
> > specifications. We just change the appropriate prop to "0"
> >
> > Cheers
> >
> > Martin
>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Wed Mar 14 2001 - 10:27:06 CST