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Hi 
+1
or find them a programs or suite that does do things the mad way that
they are looking for
Regards from
Tom
Actually, Tim, we're not that different. I learned on an Underwood and began using computers in the days of the Commodore 64 and MS-DOS (albeit as a lawyer, not a programmer). I was a slow convert to Styles because, like you, I was constantly seeking simplicity in my solutions.
I spent years perfecting my use of PC-Write. Then, my office switched to Windows 3.1 and WordPerfect for Windows. Knowing the investment I had made in PC-Write, I really didn't want to re-invest my time learning another full-featured word processor. So, instead, I began using Windows Write (the precursor to WordPad).
I loved it. It was the epitome of simplicity. No styles, no templates, no "reveal codes" or complex menus and toolbars to complicate life. Just a digital typewriter with True Type fonts. I was easily able to create legal briefs and other documents. The program was limited to a single file, so there was no bloat (other than the inherent bloat of Windows) and it was free and immediately available on any computer with Windows.
Now, from a typographic standpoint, a legal brief is fairly simple. The main text is double spaced with a first line indent (the tab key worked nicely). Quoted matter is single-spaced and indented. Then, there are section headings. I typically would have three levels of section headings. They were boldface or italic type with either left or centered alignment and with or without numbering. I always wanted to make sure my headings stayed on the same page as the following paragraph as I didn't want a heading by itself at the bottom of the page. My top level would also typically start with a new page. I was able to accomplish all of this with Write, using the K.I.S.S. method. It felt good not having to wade through multiple layers of menus to find that one buried formatting command. Of course, this meant I had to directly and manually format each of my paragraphs and headings, making sure they were consistent, with a page break before each top-level heading, and with none of my headings landing at the bottom of the page.
After several legal briefs, I realized I was duplicating a lot of my effort each time I wrote a brief not only within each brief, but from one document to the next. And, sometimes, I failed in keeping my headings consistent. Was that supposed to be 12-point bold, or 14-point italic? It changed depending on the court I was in.
Then I discovered paragraph styles. After an initial time investment in education, I have become a believer. Rather than manually formatting 7 to 10 section headings per brief, I have created three paragraph styles controlling font, size, weight, alignment, and placement on the page. I now apply many formatting characteristics with one mouse click. I no longer *ever* type a tab key to indent a paragraph. I *know* my section headings will be consistent and that page breaks will always appear before my top level heading. And, then, by using styles for my headings, I can easily and automatically generate a fully-formatted and numbered table of contents with three mouse clicks, rather than typing the whole thing manually. Yes, it took time to create my styles, but the time saved in my actual work is not insignificant.
It is certainly simpler to insert a section heading with a single mouse click on "Heading 1" than it is to hit <ctrl-enter> for a page break, then <ctrl-e> to center the paragraph, then <ctrl-b> to make it bold, and then click on the point size to increase it, and then after typing my heading, hit <ctrl-b> to turn off my boldface, <ctrl-l> to left align the next paragraph and click on the point size to decrease it, and do this each and every time I insert a heading hoping I don't make a mistake. Just describing it is exhausting.
So, yes, if you prefer the typewriter method, by all means use it. I would never try to force styles on you. But, I hope you don't consider my attempts at styles evangelism to be "forcing." Just trying to point out that the K.I.S.S. method may seem simpler to those of us who learned our craft on the typewriter, but in the long run, it does result in more work and less consistent results.
Virgil
Hi
Again, it's another advantage of OpenSource, or at least non-MS stuff.
There is an entire eco-system of similar programs and suites that can
all work on the same documents as each other but each provides for
different niches, as well as all covering all the same middle-ground
as each other.
If you see LibreOffice as just 1 product on it's own, in the same way
that MS Office is designed to be then you miss out on tons of the vast
benefit of moving to an OpenSource package such as LibreOffice.
A lot of people get confused by having such a range of choice. They
think that just because there is such a wide range there is some
impression that they could make a wrong choice and so they want to
know "which is best". The answer is "all of them". For some reason
they happily choose just 1 flavour (or choose a mix) of ice-cream or
manage to choose whether to buy oranges rather than apples. How many
people ask whether oranges are "better" than apples!!
Regards from
Tom
I admit that I, too, grew up using a typewriter and was an IBM mainframe programmer, and as such could not really see any need to use styles. Then I got involved in constructing documents by collaborating with co-authors located in various locations. This gave rise to the use of master documents and showed me the error of my ways. I also admit that even though I use page styles in my master document creation, I've never been able to understand how to use the paragraph and character styles and suspect that this might be limiting my formatting ability in LO. I tried to define a paragraph style but had no luck. How would you define a paragraph style to handle a dictionary entry such as this:
*canuscere*/v.t./ to know, to be familiar with.
I see my formatting was lost on that example. The headword "canuscere" would be in 11 pt. boldface, while the rest of the line would be in 9 pt. normal, except that the "v.t." would be italicized.
You've got two things going on here, as I see it. The *paragraph* style would determine the primary font and style of the paragraph (9 pt. normal) along with paragraph indents and any extra space above or below the paragraph. The boldface "canuscere" and italicized "/v.t./" would not be controlled by the paragraph style. They could either be controlled through direct character formatting, or with a character style, (defined as either 11-point boldface or 9-point italics). Then, you would apply the paragraph style to the whole paragraph and then the character style to the individual words to which they would apply.
Quite honestly, I rarely use character styles, but in this case where you're changing two characteristics (9 points to 11 and normal weight to boldface), the character style would help ensure consistency throughout the document. With the italicized "/v.t./" I don't see any advantage to using a characters style as you're only changing one feature (normal to italics). Just highlight the text and hit <ctrl-i> and you're done.
Virgil
Then s/he should not be using a master document, which is surely meant for the situation in which control by the master document is desired? To incorporate separate documents keeping their own properties, use sections - ticking Link and browsing to the component document file on the Section tab of the Insert Section dialogue.
Brian Barker
Your history as a programmer is relevant - but leads me to an opposite conclusion. Surely in programming a computer, you quickly learned that when you needed substantially similar logic at more than one place in a piece of software, the reliable and maintainable technique was to separate that part of the code and to write it once as a separate routine, invoked from as many places as necessary. Styles are just the same: you get them right once and use them as often as you need. You don't fall into the trap of having many identical occurrences of something but with one or two - in error - different (though you didn't notice). When you inevitably need to make changes to your arrangements, you make them in one place and can be confident that they will be instantly applied everywhere appropriate.
Brian Barker
Please don't be irked. The point is relevant and genuine: given the option, people will often use simple methods and fail to exploit the power of any facility. That's unfortunate. Indeed, even people who have learned efficient techniques will occasionally revert to less efficient methods. In doing so, they reinforce their memory of the poor techniques and make it even less likely they will harness the power of the product next time they need the same facility. That's one reason why good employers retrain their staff regularly.
Brian Barker
+1
Styles are another way of separating data and presentation which is a
long standing programming mantra. A programmer should be interested in that.
Hi, Tom and others.
I am finding this discussion to be intellectually stimulating though I have no idea as to the mechanics involved in developing or using master documents.
What you write about saving time is most likely very true. However I have probably never written a document with more than about a dozen paragraphs and I have no idea where to look for the study materials that you say can be read in ten minutes thus immediately saving twenty minutes to an hour.
I think that my only contact with the concept of master documents in Writer is what I've read in various threads on this mailing list. The same applies to the concept of pivot tables in Calc. Both are clearly good concepts to understand and employ.
At least 90% of my use of LO involves Calc. "Styles" are also employed in Calc but maybe that's comparable to comparing apples and elephants (both begin with a vowel). I have made very clumsy use of conditional formatting in Calc. I am sure there are more efficient techniques available than I use to format spreadsheets but again I don't know what to read and I don't have funds to purchase technical books.
One participant in this discussion says he learned to type on a typewriter and to program on mainframes before personal computers came into being. I also fit this demographic category having learned to type in high school the mid '50s and to program on IBM and Univac mainframes in the mid '60s. This old dog _is_ willing to learn new tricks but needs guidance finding how.
hello
please keep to default unformatted text for ctrl+v or pop-up or style like as ms office word...why not?
Having shouted the glories of styles, let me also say that their benefit comes from doing the same types of documents over and over again. If I were using Writer to create a wide variety of (relatively short) documents, then styles might make me go mad. To use them properly would require me to create dozens of templates and styles covering every type of possible situation. That might take far more time than just typing the dang letter and hitting <ctrl-p>.
As for master documents, I wouldn't go down that road unless I were doing a truly massive project, in which one minor corruption could ruin the entire document.
Virgil
I'm not quite sure what you're asking, but if you hit <shift+ctrl+v> you will see several options, including one to paste the text as unformatted.
It's a *wonderful* option.
Virgil
I've been transferring a fairly mature bunch of spreadsheets from Ooo to LO and there's one remaining problem. The front end sheet has a [Goodbye] button to close it which finds all open docs, closes them and then closes the front end. Both the find-open-components stuff and the close stuff are lifted straight from Andrew Pitonyak.
When you shut down after pressing [Goodbye] (which you do, it's a dedicated machine) you get '/usr/lib/libreoffice/soffice not responding'. If you close the front end with the close button you don't - but then it doesn't do its cleanup.
Any suggestions?
Hello rmg,
When you shut down after pressing [Goodbye] (which you do, it's a
dedicated machine) you get '/usr/lib/libreoffice/soffice not
responding'. If you close the front end with the close button you don't
- but then it doesn't do its cleanup.Any suggestions?
soffice doesn't exist there on my system; I have /usr/bin/soffice which
is a link to /usr/lib/libreoffice/program/soffice
I suggest you check your spreadsheet for references
to /usr/lib/libreoffice/soffice and if they exist, change them
to /usr/bin/soffice
Your coding statement[s] seem to suggest Object Orientated Programming. Well they did not have that type of programming in any of the mainframe languages I learned or used. OOP was a new thing when I went for my last degree in programing and had only one brief section of a class about it. Now that OOP is more of the standard, people may not remember that "us older and/or mainframe programmers" were not exposed to OOP in our education and working environments, unless we brought it into work and tried to get our boss to except that new and "radical" technology.
Sure, as a programmer, I wrote procedures, functions, and routines, that I would then "make fit" into the new work, but the only time we "called" a "sub-program" was when we has a main program and we called complete programs and not "objects". Most people I worked under wanted every single program to be self contained. That way there was no accidents with these "funny new objects getting lost or deleted". Times are very different now. The last big company I worked at still used the old IBM mainframe tech, even though Windows servers were out and being used by a lot of companies. Just before I left, they bought a rack of IBM servers to deal with some of the newer data communications between factories.
SO, you might guess that I had not been exposed with OOP till I started to play with C++ in my "forced retirement" from my work related injuries and several strokes.
I know the theory, but I have not the experience of a programmer who grew up using OOP in their daily life.
Of course, I do use CSS in my web site designing, but I have not done much since my back/neck/shoulder injuries got worse. I decided to spend most of my PC time with LO support and "enhancement projects" - i.e. 797K word dictionary, and the new expended color palette options porject.
Your coding statement[s] seem to suggest Object Orientated Programming.
No: that's a straw man. What I said applies to programming generally (as someone else has confirmed).
... in any of the mainframe languages I learned or used.
Your "mainframe languages" would have had the properties I described.
Brian Barker
Perhaps, we could get folks past the Underwood model if office suites
stopped offering that as a legitimate option for creating typeset
documents.
*Proper* document processing software should indeed *enforce* total
separation of structure(d content) and style information through
*exclusive*, *mandatory* use of stylesheets.
And thus prevent people from producing un-reuseable spaghetti garbage.
Because that's what IT is about in the first place: Making content
easily re-usable.
Sincerely,
Wolfgang
Hi
I wish MS had got that memo! Sadly that seems to be the opposite of
MS's view. So people have learned to;
1. need to keep a print-out as "hard copy"
2. assume every document to be unsable in 3 years time
3. fight hard against any change or upgrade because they know it will
break their system and make everything unreadable.
4. hate and mistrust IT because it's so unreliable and unpredictable
Hopefully we can help free people themselves from the mess they are in
but most times it's better to just sit back and feel smug, or even
laugh at them as they struggle on with things that LibreOffice,
OpenOffice, Caligra, AbiWord (and all the rest) make really simple and
reliable.
Regards from
Tom