[scribus-dev] Who is going to kill the style dialog ?

[Louis Desjardins]

2010/11/1 a.l.e <ale.comp_06 at xox.ch>

> ciao louis,
>

Salut Ale !

>
> > And this is exaclty why I say that in this particular case of styles
> > we should not need any further interface than the one we already have
> > in front of us: the actual page! Why an extra dialog is beyond me.
>
> it may be a good idea... but also a horrible one...
>

:) Yesterday was Hallowe’en...

>
> on the one side it's nice to be 100% free in our actions, on the other side
> i fear that we need some control on which formatting make it in the style
> definition and we probably also need an overview and fine tweaking.
>

All of this can be acheived on the canvas.

Experiment as you wish and stabilise when you’re ready (or when you think
you are...). Fine tweak. Change only one parameter and save as a new style
when you are ready to do so. That’s even simpler than Duplicate a style and
then open the actual Style Manager dialog, edit it and then apply it to see
the change and then confirm.

Say you want to set the type of a brand new book. Say it’s the brand new
Scribus manual. You’re not sure about which font you’re going to use, which
font size, which linespacing, if you’re going to need a drop cap or no, what
space between paragraphs and in the end will there be any or would you
prefer an indention on the first line or both a space and an indention,
whatever. You need to experiment, to play around with pages and pages, print
them, compare them, test readability, try to evaluate the number of pages,
tweak again, increase the typesize, the linespacing, tweak the hyphenation
settings, set the headers, running titles, titles, subtitles of all
levels...

This typical job would need, say, 10 or so stylesheets but you don’t know
yet how they are going to be defined. You are experimenting. And once you
think you’re done, you might even change your mind afterwards and this is
all so easy with the magic of stylesheets.

So, all the experimental work is done and now you think you are ready to
have your ideas fixed into stylesheets because you have this book to format
and you don’t want to apply dozens of settings to hundreds of cases.

Here comes the magic. Why open a dialog and re-enter the values you already
have found and set? Just put the cursor on the paragraph you like and
right-click, type the name for this style and hit the keypad for a shortcut
if you need one, and that’s it! Click on the next formatted paragraph you
need a style sheet for and do the same. In seconds you’ll have all the style
sheets you need for the paragraphs of the Scribus manual.

And if for any reason you’ll need to fine tune again, read below!

>
>
> but the idea is not bad at all:
>
> - right click on a paragraph and define a paragraph from its formatting
>

Right click on a paragraph and be prompted for a name (and an optional
shortcut if you need one). Type the name, hit the OK button and that’s it.
There! You have your style.

>
> - right click on the paragraph and get a list of the differences against
> the current style. you can accept or reject each of them and patch the
> paragraph style
>

Hum... it’s not what I envision here! I would not want to see of a list of
differences and accept or reject each of them. I think the process can be
more straightforward than that. This reminds me of the hyphenation dialog
when a certain check box used to be checked by default and you would be
prompted for each and every hyphen... A nightmare we could fortunately awake
from and turn off!

>
> - open the style dialog and you can check and fine tune it
>

You already *are* in the "style dialog" because you are on the page and you
have all you need in front of you. If you want to fine tune a style that
already exists or edit it in any way, you simply modify the paragraph
settings and right click. You’ll be prompted for either create a new style
or apply the changes to the existing style if there was one applied to this
paragraph!

The Manager would simply list the available styles you can pick to apply to
any paragraph or your choice. In this small window you could delete styles
or map one or more styles to another existing style. Manage. Not set, tweak,
create. Manage. The Manager could tell you how many instances use this
style, for example. The Manager could allow to print a list of the settings
used in all the stylesheet and print a sample text showing each of the style
sheets used in the file. This would be very useful for quality control and
for proofreaders who would know precisely what settings were used or were
supposed to be used.

- this should be true for each type of style (char, line, frame, ...)
>

Very precisely yes! :)

>
> - each style editor is a separate window (no style manager anymore!)
>

> let's have a dream...
>

Exactly! :)

Salut!

Louis

>
>
>
> ciao
> a.l.e
>
>
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