Re: [office] Style properties questions/requests

[Michael Brauer <michael.brauer@sun.com>]

Hi David,

David Faure wrote:
> Text properties:
> 
> style:text-crossing-out (3.10.6) doesn't have support for stylelines (solid, dash, dot, dashdot, dashdotdot)
> KOffice supports crossing out text with various style of lines.

> 
> style:text-underline (3.10.22) should separate the number of lines (single/double) from the style of the lines (dotted etc.).
> This allows more combinations, like double-dotted, etc.
> The presence of all the bold-* values also suggests that bold should be separated.

Both sounds reasonable. Do you think we should have seperate attribute 
or should only separate the values (like "single dotted bold")? We might 
also consider to use the same values for both attributes.

> 
> Paragraph properties:
> 
> fo:text-align (3.11.4) doesn't seem to have "auto" (for bidi text). This is used
> in KOffice to mean that the alignment of the paragraph depends on whether
> it starts with a RTL character. Apparently this is a common feature for RTL users,
> to have the alignment and the direction of the paragraph automatically detected
> that way.

One might do so, but since XSL does not have a value for this, we would 
have to change the namespace. Instead we might also add a new attribute 
that only specifies that the alignment should be derived from the text 
and leave the fo:text-align unchanged.

> 
> style:tab-stop (3.11.10) 
> I found out that common values for leading-char (in OOo) are '.', '-' and '_'
> (this should be documented btw).
> In KOffice we are currently using line styles instead (none, dots, plain line, dash,
> dash-dot, dash-dot-dot), but this indeed misses something like '-', i.e. at 
> the middle vertically (all the lines are currently drawn at the baseline).
> Does anyone know what other word processors use? If they all use characters
> I guess I'll switch to that, otherwise we might need something a bit more flexible...
> 
> fo:keep-with-next/style:keep-with-next (3.11.31) Please fix the documentation
> if it hasn't been done yet, since Daniel said:
> "It's always fo:keep-with-next. The documentation is wrong; we 
> don't use style:keep-with-next anywhere.

Thanks for reminding us that this is still wrong in the specification.

A similar error occured for the various fo:*-asian and fo:*-complex 
properties that in fact have to be in the style namespace.

> 
> style:line-break (3.10.37) (apparently this should be moved to paragraph properties)
> What's strict linebreaking? The documentation only says it can be normal or strict...

In some asian languages there are so called "forbidden" characters that 
must not appear at the beginning or the end of a text line. The 
"style:line-break" attribute specifies whether a line break is allowed 
at any position or only at positions where the resulting lines will not 
start or end with an "forbidden" character. The list of forbidden 
characters is language dependent and normaly supplied by the same "i18n" 
framework that evaluates possible hyphen positions.

In the OpenOffice.org application the forbidden character lists can be 
edited. If it has been edited, it is stored in the application specific 
settings of the document. However, one can also specify whether the 
forbidden characters shall be loaded together with a document or whether 
the defaults should be used in any case. This means that they are 
somehow comparable to personal dictionaries that are used for 
hyphenation, except that they are never stored in a document.

You are right that style:line-break should be moved to the paragraph 
properties. This also applies to style:punctuation-wrap and 
style:text-autospace.

> 
> Thanks for your input,
> David.
> 

Thanks for your input as well. I would like to add a single item only:

The style:text-background-color attribute can from my point of view be 
removed, because a differentiation between text and paragraph 
backgrounds is existing already since we replaced the <style:properties> 
element with <style:text-properties> and <style:paragraph-properties>.

Best regards

Michael