Bug 46550 - FORMATTING Styles Editing is cumbersome and confusing
Summary: FORMATTING Styles Editing is cumbersome and confusing
Status: NEW
Alias: None
Product: LibreOffice
Classification: Unclassified
Component: Writer (show other bugs)
Version: 3.5.0 release
Hardware: Other All
: high enhancement
Assignee: Not Assigned
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Reported: 2012-02-23 18:25 UTC by Jon Grossart
Modified: 2014-01-20 08:57 UTC (History)
3 users (show)

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Description Jon Grossart 2012-02-23 18:25:41 UTC
So, I've been working on ditching MS Office and moving completely over to LibO. As a professional, I take a lot of notes in my continuing ed classes, which of course requires a lot of repetitive formatting.

MS Office makes this somewhat of a breeze to make "pretty" documents.  It has "Quick Styles" which let you easily change the basic look of the document (set styling for title/headers).

In LibO, this is a giant pain. It comes with no built options (fine as a default), but has no ability to have a set of "style sets". I can import them from another doc or template, but then I don't have the fine grain to really just select the parts I want other than "text", "frame", "page", etc.

Also, editting the styles is also over complex, i.e., lacking a UX. To even get to the styling menu, I have to pull the F11 styling window, then actually find the style I want.  Then right click, then edit it in a separate pop-up window with multiple tabs. Rinse and repeat.

One thing LibO does better is to be able to have a list style created as a style, and then be able to apply the same one everywhere.  MS Office only has a "continue previous list" option if you want something other than the built in choices (from what I've seen).

Enhancement Request:
1a) add something like Quick Styles for basic formatting styles 
 or
1b) add some what to actually see what you're going to be pulling in from an import of styles or show the conflicts in stead of just "no overwrite" or "overwrite"

2) add a styles UI
i) add a preview of the style as you're creating it so you can see the spacing, color, margins, etc. as you're working on it. You can do this with font already, but not with the other parts. It could have a single preview all the options (using the page margin graphics from a normal document so you could see the edges of the "box" you're creating).
ii) could integrate the list/bullet stuff into this styles UI, which has it's own mini-preview, but under a different window.

3) change name of some of default styles
As I was looking through the bugs/discussion of styles looking for info, someone who seemed to know what they were talking about said to never alter "default" other than for font family and size because everything else cascades off of then; he also said to use "text body" for all of your actual text. However, when you start a new document, default comes up as the first style being used. If I'm just typing away, and not using headers, then I never see "Text Body" pop up as the current default style. Plus, if you go back and do headers later, it doesn't fix the text after it to be "text body".

Again, coming from MS Office, "Default" is used there as only default from before Office 2007 for single spaced, no space between paragraphs/carriage returns. In LibO, default is the base style. It might be helpful to change it "Base", or "Parent" and change the default style when you open a document to be "Text Body". And it might be helpful to limit options or least warn when editing "Default" about the huge effects it can have.
Comment 1 Joel Madero 2012-08-07 15:19:57 UTC
I just played around with MS Word a bit and I agree, their system seems to be a bit more of a breeze to make things pretty. I'm going to mark this as NEW and leave as a HIGH priority. I'll let whoever gets a chance to pick this up decide on how to implement. They may have questions but this is a bigger request so it most likely will be awhile before someone gets a chance. 

I'm going to CC two of the developers which are more active in the Writer component. Maybe they'll have further input. 

Cédric and Michael, what do you think?
Comment 2 Cédric Bosdonnat 2014-01-20 08:57:51 UTC
Restricted my LibreOffice hacking area


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