Named style behavior [was Re: change keyboard shortcuts]

[Ken Case]

On Jan 19, 2006, at 15:17 , Nicholas Riley wrote:
> It reminds me of another thing - is there a way to do "Show Styles  
> View" other than the menu?

Clicking on a level style in the drawer will also switch to the  
styles view, and you can customize your toolbar to include a Styles  
View tool.

> I often find my named styles are being misapplied - i.e., if you  
> have a heading with a single subhead and apply a style to the  
> subhead, it gets saved at the level of the heading, which means  
> that additional subheads get the style when I don't want them to,

You can turn off Automatic Level Styles in the Format menu to prevent  
OmniOutliner from learning level styles by example.  (To turn this  
off for all documents, edit the template for new documents.)

> and there's no way to turn off the style from the keyboard I know of.

You should be able to turn off the style using the same keyboard  
shortcut as you use to turn it on.  (It's a toggle.)

> The "Style Attributes" palette doesn't show attributes of subheads,  
> so if I delete the last styled subhead of some heading, the style  
> is lurking in wait to reapply the next time I create a subhead, yet  
> it's not visible anywhere in the UI I can tell.

You can tell where these styles are lurking using the Styles view  
(and you can remove them by clicking on them and hitting Delete), but  
hopefully turning off Automatic Level Styles will prevent them from  
happening in the first place.

> If it's the only heading in the document, it's even worse - the  
> Styles View shows nothing even when I click on the subhead, because  
> the style gets applied to "All level n rows", and neither does the  
> style get updated in the drawer (is there a different "All level n  
> rows" being used here that I'm
> unaware of?).

The style view should show more than one style chit (the "A" icon),  
and you can select and view the styles associated with that level by  
clicking on it.

> Compared with MORE's rules, which were more logical, visible  
> without requiring a special mode, and above all entirely  
> manipulable from the keyboard, I find OmniOutliner's styles to be  
> really painful

I certainly do think that there is room for improvement in  
OmniOutliner's styling system, and we welcome your feedback.  Do you  
have some specific suggestions (beyond looking at how MORE worked)?

> - second only to the notes toggle behavior, which I've already  
> reported... why on earth must I enter a note before I can hide it?

Sorry, I'm not familiar with your earlier report about toggling  
notes, and I'm not sure what problem you're running into.  I can  
select a mix of rows, some with and some without notes, and toggle  
the visibility of all of them using Command-'.

> I tried using the Keyboard Shortcuts in System Preferences to set a  
> shortcut for "Show Styles View", but they stop working after I do  
> various things which I imagine cause OmniOutliner to refresh its  
> menus (such as clicking in the topic), until I pull down the menu  
> again.

Looks like that's a bug:  I'd be surprised if the keyboard shortcut  
itself has been lost, but the action seems to be disabled when the  
selection is in the topic header.  (I can't select it from the menu  
item either.)

> I run into the above problems many times a day, because I use named  
> styles to mark items in my to-do list as "priority", "in progress"  
> and so forth, and very often end up with unintended style  
> application as I describe.

To summarize:  turning off Automatic Level Styles may be a better fit  
for your work habits--and yes, it's possible to turn off named styles  
by using their keyboard shortcut.  I hope this helps somewhat!

And do let us know if you have suggestions on ways we can make this  
work better.

				Ken