office-collab — archive

[Dennis Hamilton]

Based on the ODF documents I've inspected, and the OpenOffice scenarios that produce them, automatic styles are not accessible to users. That is, they are created by formatting actions by users but they are not perceivable. All the user sees is the formatting action. This seems to be a consequence of the "all-formatting is via styles mantra," although modification of automatically-derived styles is generally not user functionality. (It is actually quite different to know when the same automatic style has been used in multiple places -- there does not seem any necessity to avoid multiple automatic styles that are duplications.) Now, the OpenOffice-lineage implementations do track "changed attributes" as well as insertions and deletions. I do know when I change a font when doing change-tracked modifications of an ODF specification, I see the changed-attribute marking. I suspect that if I change a defined style applicable to a passage of text, the same will happen, though I haven't had occasion to do that. I suspect that a change to the definition of a defined style will have an impact everywhere a style is used. I haven't checked that either, but I'll wager that it is not tracked because there is no way to track the change to a style definition in ODF 1.0/.../1.2. - Dennis