Re: [discuss] Question about possible style/format extension ...
Mary Compton
----- Original Message -----
From: "William W. Austin" <wau...@speakeasy.net>
To: "Openoffice" <dis...@openoffice.org>
Sent: Saturday, May 12, 2007 9:57 AM
Subject: [discuss] Question about possible style/format extension ...
>I was wondering about the desirability of a possible extension to
> formatting/styles.
>
> I am a programmer / software architect now, but in a "former life"
> (ages ago) I worked as the sysadmin at a commercial typesetting house
> (probably a nearly-dead breed by now). There I was in charge of all of
> the varied computer systems - and of doing translations between several
> mutually-exclusive typesetting systems (I suspected mutually hostile)
> like cg, linotype, cci, penta, magna, zix and a few others.
>
> Almost all of them had a couple of "format" features which I think
> might be rather useful. I'll give a couple of examples here:
>
> 1. A "delay" or "at location" feature existed which basically said
> start with such-and-such format (font, size, paragraph params, etc.),
> and at this point (usually specified in terms of page position, number
> of lines down, or inches/picas/mm/etc. down from paragraph start)
> change the format to do something else automatically. (A simple
> example: start with a line length of, say 6". Every 3 lines, decrease
> the line length by 0.5" until it reaches a width of 3", and then stay
> at that length - all in a single paragraph).
>
> 2. Automatic text - or file - insertion was also possible in many
> of these systems as the "automatic text" could be entered as part of
> the format (style) command itself, _or_ it could be entered once in the
> document and automatically copied and duplicated elsewhere in the
> document when the format was found in the doc. This was extremely
> useful for boilerplate among other things, as if the "boilerplate" was
> in a separate file, it made it possible to create a large number of
> docs (contracts and font display pages come to mind) so that the
> appropriate text could be entered once and included in hundreds of of
> documents. And if the boilerplate changed, one only had to print out
> new copies of the docs including it to have the newest version with the
> changes included. (a real time saver when there are hundreds of docs).
>
> I suspect that these might be possible by including some type of macro
> capability as a part of a style, but I haven't figured out how
> design/code either of these yet at all. The second one might be the
> more useful, so I would like to look at it first.
>
> But before I go off and start trying to work on either of these (a)
> does anyone else think that they might be useful in general (or are
> they too much "out in left field" for most users), and/or (b) is anyone
> else already working on something akin to either of them?
>
> Thanks
> - Bill
> --
> william w. austin wau...@speakeasy.net
> "life is just another phase i'm going through. this time, anyway ..."
>
>
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