[scribus] Too many styles show up when I Edit | Styles & other issues with styles

[Gary Dale]

On 2022-11-04 14:20, Gregory Pittman wrote:
> On 11/4/22 13:48, Gary Dale wrote:
>> I'm running Debian/Bookworm on an AMD64 system. Scribus is v1.5.8.
>>
>> I am having a lot of problems with styles. You can see the basic 
>> problem in the attached image which is a screenshot of Edit | Style 
>> window. I apparently have multiple "Default Paragraph Style"s, for 
>> example. This survives shutting down Scribus and restarting, as well 
>> as rebooting. Moreover I can't get rid of them without deleting the 
>> style, which would require me to replace it with something else - the 
>> extra copies don't show up in the "replace style with: dialogue so I 
>> can't replace the deleted style with the real one.
>>
>> To see what was going on, I opened my document in Kate and searched 
>> for the style definition line. It only appears once but in this 
>> particular case, I also found a "Default Paragraph Style (2)" 
>> definition that doesn't show up in the list of styles.
>>
>> For the "Bullet List Paragraph Style", which also appears 3 times, 
>> there was just the single definition line. The bullet list definition 
>> is a 3mm indent with a first line indent of -3mm. In Kate this shows 
>> up as:
>>
>>          <STYLE NAME="Bullet List Paragraph Style" PARENT="Default 
>> Paragraph Style" INDENT="8.50393700787402" FIRST="-8.50393700787402" 
>> VOR="0"/>
>>
>> However some of my bullet lists show the correct indents while others 
>> seem to ignore them. I traced this down to flowing text around a 
>> picture frame (pushing the left margin to the right of the picture). 
>> When this happens, Scribus (incorrectly in my opinion) ignores the 
>> indents. I suggest that the better behaviour is for Scribus to apply 
>> the indent rules after wrapping the text, so that the first bit of 
>> text in a line gets the first line indent while the subsequent lines 
>> get the default indent.
>>
>> Finally, when I import a page or copy a section of a different 
>> document into a document, it pulls in all of the styles from the 
>> source document and not just the ones used in that page/section. This 
>> leaves me with a lot of extra styles that I have to delete. Scribus 
>> doesn't even check to see if styles with the same name have the same 
>> definition - it simply renames the imported style and uses it.
>>
>> I believe it would be better to ask the user about conflicting names 
>> when they actually occur in in the parts being imported rather than 
>> simply assuming that we want to other document's styles. However, 
>> even discarding the source document's styles when they conflict seems 
>> better than duplicating them. Maybe is just my use case, but I think 
>> its more likely that the destination document's styles are likely to 
>> be the same or updated versions of the styles from the source document.
>
> Hi Gary,
>
> Somehow you've managed to create all these duplications. Your best bet 
> is to go through them and delete the ones you don't want. Scribus 
> expects you to be in control of the naming of styles.
>
I didn't create duplicates and they don't exist in the document - when I 
open it in Kate, there is only one style element for the various 
duplicated names. If I had created styles with duplicate names, there 
should be multiple style elements with the same name.

Indeed, looking at the document, the style names only occur exactly 
where I would I expect them - in the style element and in each paragraph 
element that uses that style. There must something in the Scribus code 
that is creating the duplicates because the duplicates are not in the 
document's .sla file.

If you refer to the attachment in the original post, I just tried to 
delete Bullet List 2 Paragraph Style, which I wasn't using (yet). 
Deleting it removed all three occurrences in the single operation. 
Adding it back in creates 3 new copies. However, you will note that 
there is only one instance of List Paragraph Style, so it's not as 
simple as the 3 "Default Paragraph Style"s propagating.

I notice there are also at least 2 styles that don't show up in the list 
but are in the document (Copy of Default Paragraph Style & Default 
Paragraph Style (2)) - but are only defined, not used. I can't delete 
them directly through Scribus but they do show up in the list of 
replacement styles dialogue.

Anyway, what this suggests is that the routine that loads the document 
styles is creating duplicates for some reason. The Edit Styles dialogue 
is omitting some styles that exist in the document and that must have 
been loaded. Here's the style element for one of them:

<STYLE NAME="Copy of Default Paragraph Style" DefaultStyle="1" ALIGN="0" 
LINESPMode="1" LINESP="15" INDENT="0" RMARGIN="0" FIRST="0" VOR="0" 
NACH="0" ParagraphEffectOffset="0" DROP="0" DROPLIN="2" 
OpticalMargins="0" CPARENT="Default Character Style"/>

As I said, I can see it as a replacement style but can't use it as a 
style nor delete it.