Subject: Re: The New Styles
From: Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Date: Thu Mar 15 2001 - 13:08:39 CST
At 03:47 PM 3/14/01 -0500, Randy Kramer wrote:
><nope, ignore this, although it might be something I reconsider
>someday> Anyway, I'd like to request that an option be maintained to
>refer to an external stylesheet (or template) instead of storing the
>styles within the document.
Do you really mean "instead of", or do you just want an easy way to keep a
document in sync with changes to its underlying template?
For example, when you open a document, we could conceivably check to see if
the referenced template had been updated since the last time we extracted
style information from it. If so, a popup dialog could ask whether you want
to remerge.
>There is a second reason that is less ranty. If you have multiple
>documents (including master/sub documents) it is easier to maintain the
>same style in each (if that's what you want to do) if they are all based
>on an external stylesheet or template. By making changes to the styles
>in the external template, all documents based on that template change
>their appearance. Word 97 still allows that, so I don't know how to
>describe the interaction between that external template and styles
>stored internally -- my guess is that, when a new template is applied,
>the internally stored styles are replaced by the styles (with the same
>names) from the new template.
If your guess is correct, that shouldn't be hard to implement for any
full-fledged template implementation. Merging is the easy part. The hard
work is to nail down the UI for:
- locate the template file in an XP way
- decide when to initiate the merge
- decide what to do about conflicts (if any)
I'm pretty rusty on what the potential UI alternatives for these would be.
Paul
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