RE: [office] Styles in the documents

["Francis Cave" <francis@franciscave.com>]

Hi Regina

Thank you for volunteering!

I slowly have a better understanding of the style hierarchy within ODF documents. Thanks for your tips! The use of conditional styles should be reviewed - I see both advantages and disadvantages. We also need to make sure that appropriate use is being made of list styles (for example, I'm not sure that their use for numbered Appendix headings is appropriate).

I will look at Part 2 when I've finished reviewing Part 4.

Kind regards,

Francis


-----Original Message-----
From: office@lists.oasis-open.org <office@lists.oasis-open.org> On Behalf Of Regina Henschel
Sent: 19 May 2020 22:13
To: Francis Cave <francis@franciscave.com>; office@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: Re: [office] Styles in the documents

Hi Francis,

Francis Cave schrieb am 19-May-20 um 19:59:
> Hi Regina
> 
> I am currently performing a similar exercise: examining the use of styles in all drafts of ODF 1.3 since June 2018. I too am using the LibreOffice user interface to analyse the use of paragraph styles, but am using an XML editor to analyse the use of character styles.
> 
> I note the following regarding the use of paragraph styles in Part 3:
> 
> - The root style 'Default Style' appears infrequently in all drafts, gradually increasing in number from 8 in WD10 to 21 in CSD02. There are examples of its use in all drafts in 19.543.2 and 19.543.3. I think all regular text paragraphs should be styled 'Text Body'.

I would prefer 'Text Body' in principle too. Only we need to agree on that for ODF 1.4. But 'Text Body' has a very strange position in the hierarchical view.
Examine Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) Version 1.3. Part 2: Packages

And that document has in general a questionable hierarchy. It has a set of paragraph styles based on 'Default Paragraph Style' and another set based on 'Normal'. The style name 'Normal' and the lot of ww... 
character and list styles indicates for me, that there had been some import from a docx-document.

> 
> - The styles 'AppendixHeading', 'AppendixHeadingA1' and 'AppendixHeadingA2' were introduced only in CSD02. They replaced 'Appendix Heading', which was used (for all heading levels in appendices) in all drafts up to and including CSD01. The styles 'Appendix Heading 2' and 'Appendix Heading 3' aren't used in any of the drafts.

This 'Appendix' mess needs a clean-up for ODF 1.4.

> 
> - The style 'Bullet List' is used, but only a few times in chapter 20, for example in 20.255 in CSD02. Most bulleted lists are styled 'Text Body' with direct style overrides. In my opinion style overrides should be the exception rather than the rule, so I would like to see all regular bulleted lists styled 'Bullet List'.

The prepared styles from LO follow the idea to have a parent list style 
e.g. 'List 1' and then derived style 'List 1 Start', 'List 1 Cont.' and 
'List 1 End'. That way it is possible to consider the different top and 
bottom paragraph margins of the list items without direct formatting. 
But LibreOffice provides only the names, you have to make the needed 
settings manually. 'List' was intended to be used with bullet lists; for 
numbered lists e.g. 'Numbering 1' was intended.

An own style 'Bullet List' is OK for me, but you will likely need 
'Bullet List Start', 'Bullet List Cont.' and 'Bullet List End' in addition.

> 
> - I don't see any uses of the style 'Caption' in any draft. Can you provide an example? If I search for its use in LO, nothing is found.

It is used indirectly. It is the hierarchy
Normal
     Caption
         Drawing
         Figure
         Illustration
         Table
         Text

 From that hierarchy 'Table' is used in
Table 1 - section 1.5 Namespaces (page 9)
https://docs.oasis-open.org/office/OpenDocument/v1.3/csprd02/part2-packages/OpenDocument-v1.3-csprd02-part2-packages.odt
for example.

You cannot find such styles by "Find & Replace" tool, because that tool 
only finds the actual applied styles and not their parents. You can find 
them quickly, if you temporarily change the background color to 'pink' 
for example, and then scroll through the document in multi-page view 
with small zoom value.

> 
> - The style 'Default Text' is used just once in 20.236, and appears for the first time in CSD01. I think this should be 'Text Body'.
> 
> - The style 'Default Value' was used in all drafts up to WD13-02, but doesn't appear in any later drafts, so something happened in preparing WD13-03 that removed this style.

If we want to extract default values by a program, then it would be good 
to use a special style for default values.

> 
> Regarding character styles in Part 3, please note that the style 'Formula Sub' is actually mis-spelt 'Furmula Sub', which should be corrected in the ODF 1.4 template. The character style 'Keyword' is used just once in Part 3, so is probably a mistake. The character style 'ISO Keyword' is used inconsistently. There are two groups of character styles whose members seem to overlap strongly in their use:
> 
> - 'Label' and 'Note Label';
> 
> - 'Element', 'Source Text' and 'Teletype'.
> 
> There is clearly much that could be done to improve the use of styles and make it easier to perform reliable transformations on the ODF 1.4 specification.

I volunteer to help with that. But it must be clear, what styles are 
used or will be used in scripts and in general, which set of styles we 
want to use.

Kind regards
Regina

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