Bug 160746

Summary:	master document / Styles menu (and sidebar) a new item: "Styles Organizer"
Product:	LibreOffice	Reporter:	peter josvai <jepe>
Component:	Writer	Assignee:	Not Assigned <libreoffice-bugs>
Status:	NEEDINFO ---
Severity:	enhancement	CC:	dgp-mail
Priority:	medium
Version:	24.8.0.0 alpha0+ Master
Hardware:	All
OS:	All
Whiteboard:
Crash report or crash signature:		Regression By:

Description peter josvai 2024-04-20 13:20:21 UTC

hi,

// note:
I'm aware that a style inspector exists, but I find it completely unusable, cause it gives you an under the hood view, so to speak, and not human readable.. so I pretend that it doesn't even exist :)
This suggestion is about a different thing anyway...
note end //

This idea involves a new step in separating the Master Document from normal documents... Cause this menu would, as I imagine, only exist in Navigator...

...................
What "Styles Organizer" could do:
...................

• It could list all the styles in the document (the master document) that are in use.

○ Clicking on one such style in the list would give you detailed info...
how many times altogether in which (sub) documents...
○ from here you could go to a good style inspector that would give you a human readable overview of the style's attributes... (that are set, not inherited) or you could go to the basic "styles" menu, (aka Manage Styles), where you could modify it...

• It could also list the styles which haven't been overridden by the " Master Style Sheet" defined in the master document template... (those which came in the document with the subdocuments... and lay low, escaping our control :))

• Here you could do sophisticated global editing of styles...
for example, committing global "changes", without editing the sub-documents... by "referencing" (linking), or rather, merging some styles... into one of them...

_______________
an EXAMPLE:

One of the documents have a custom style for quotation, like, "Q-old-text", used extensively, but haven't been defined in the master document's "master style sheet" -- so to speak... (that is, in the template)
Here, in the Styles Organizer, you could make all quotations look the same, by submitting styles "under" master styles...
_______________

I'm aware that this again brings up the style sheet problem...
namely, that we still use templates as style sheets...

But these changes could be implemented, I guess, without changing anything yet... All it takes is a new menu...

- - - thank you for developing Libreoffice and WRITER - - -

Comment 1 Dieter 2024-05-09 10:43:44 UTC

Peter, perhaps I don't understand everything of your idea, but just a few remarks:

1. I'm not sure, if you're talking about master documents or templates
2. You can already see, which styles are in use ("Applied Styles" view in styles part of the sidebar). And since version 7.6 you can enable "spotlight" to make different styles more visible
3. Style inspector provides information only for the cursor location. So it's very useful to detect direct formatting. I'm not sure, if your report has that in mind.

So in sum, I don't understand your idea and I don't see the need for a new feature.

So perhaps you've taken all that information into account. In this case, sorry for my remarks. If not: Do those information change something for you?
=> NEEDINFO