OOo Off the Wall: Combining Documents with OOo (Linux Journal) [LWN.net]

Linux Journal looks at combining documents and other advantages of using styles in OpenOffice.org. "WordPerfect veterans raise the idea of a Reveal Codes feature for Writer every couple of months. In response, a macro that gives the appearance of Reveal Codes without the functionality has been written. However, the feature isn't likely to appear in any upcoming version of Writer. For one thing, while WordPerfect is a code-based word processor, in which every piece of formatting is embedded in a manner not too different from HTML tags, Writer is a frame-based one processor. That means the characteristics for a selection of text are defined separately from the text itself. As a result, no direct equivalent of Reveal Codes is possible."

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Favourite quote

Posted Apr 14, 2006 7:37 UTC (Fri) by Arker (guest, #14205) [Link]

you're probably better off using TeX than a graphical word processor.

Ok, I had to yank it out of context, I admit. I still like it.

OOo Off the Wall: Combining Documents with OOo (Linux Journal)

Posted Apr 17, 2006 14:07 UTC (Mon) by jzbiciak (✭ supporter ✭, #5246) [Link]

I'm a former WordPerfect user, and I must say that the situation I find myself most wanting "reveal codes" is NOT when merging documents. It's actually a much simpler situation.

The cursor in a graphical word processor is never on a character. It's between two characters. If the two characters it straddles have different styles, there is some ambiguity as to which style a character typed at that cursor position will be placed in--is the cursor before or after the boundary between the two styles?

I find that all too often, MS Word disambiguates this sitation differently than I expect, and end up getting frustrated with it. I end up resorting to hacks, such as backing the cursor one character backwards and chopping off the end of a previous word and retyping it, just to ensure I'm in the correct style zone. I can't comment specifically on OOo, since I don't get a chance to use it regularly.

(I don't need .DOC files in my personal life, and MS Word rules the roost at work. I don't see the need to buck the trend by installing OOo on my corporate-issue Windows laptop, since we have a site license for MS Office as well.)

So, when some people complain they want "Reveal Codes," I'd guess it's not always about munging up manual overrides to styles, as this article would seem to indicate. In my case, I just want to be able to place my cursor unambiguously on one side or the other of a style boundary. Perhaps "Reveal Style Boundaries" would be practical and helpful for this case?