oo3 Pro final: detail cultivation

[Curtis Clifton]

On Jan 10, 2005, at 10:26 AM, Alfred Lang wrote:

> 1)I definitely need as soon as possible an option to easily lock and 
> unlock rows or fields. For whenever I change some style details 
> somewhere, almost certain there appear several unmotivated and 
> absolutely unwanted style changes such as font size, color, or 
> alignment changes (e.g. right instead of left) and more in different 
> and unrelated places places. I cannot afford to check and rework a 
> file in its entirety, whenever I change something.:

Try turning off Automatic Level Styles.  With that option on, whenever 
all the rows of a given level in your document happen to have the same 
formatting then that formatting is transferred to the level style.  I 
can see why some would like this, but it seems kind of "Word-like", if 
you follow me, so I turned that option off in my default templates.

It is also helpful to show the style attributes inspector and click on 
the various style names in the document's drawer.  This lets you see 
what parts of the style that named style affects, and what parts it 
leaves alone.  For example, if the whole document style includes "Font 
= Verdana" and another style does not include a "Font = ..." attribute, 
then that style inherits the Verdana font.

Tim posted a detailed description of the style inheritance rules here 
in a thread on styles and AppleScript, but I think those rules are 
generally interesting even if you aren't a scripter.  The Style View is 
helpful in following the inheritance of styles, but the system seems to 
  lean towards completeness rather than simplicity.  Perhaps one of 
OmniGroup's crack technical writers needs to have a go at explaining 
style inheritance, though the built-in help already seems quite clear.  
(Search the help documents for "Style"; the first 8 items seem very 
relevant to anyone using styles extensively in OO3.)

Curt

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Curtis Clifton, PhD Candidate
Dept. of Computer Science, Iowa State University
http://www.cs.iastate.edu/~cclifton