Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 47893
Format --> Default resets applied character style.
Last modified: 2013-08-07 14:44:35 UTC
Writer should not remove explicitly applied character styles (via Stylist) when applying "Default Formatting" to a selection; it should only reset "overriding format" --or-- it should include an option in Stylist to chose what to reset. 1. Open a new text document. 2. New Heading1, say "Agenda". 3. New paragraph: "John, 555-1234". 4. New paragraph: "Mary, 555-1235". 5. Select "John" (w/o the phone number), make it "Bold". 6. Switch to the Character Style tab. 7. Click on "New style from selection", chosse "Name" as the name. 8. Apply "Name" to the text "Mary". 9. Apply italics to "555-1234". 10. Assume you have a great long agenda, 200 pages long. 11. Select all document. 12. Do "Format -> Default Formatting". Writer should ONLY reset the italics placed to the phone number, but it resets the names too back to not bold. XHTML equivalent: <p><span class="name">John</span>, 555-1234.</p> I would then define in the style: "name { font-weight: bold; }"
MRU->FL: for decision to you now. Currently, Format.Default turns everything back to the "default" of the paragraph style. It is quite a 50-50 thing, if it's better to leave the text formatted with character styles as is or (like now) to remove the character styles.
If FL changes it (which I hope), a user could still reset character styles by applying the "Default" character style before asking for "Format -> Default Formatting". while still having the text selected, so there would be no functionality loss. That's what the program does, anyway.
I'm trying to remember/decipher. The behavior of 1.9.95 is not the same as the behavior in 1.1.4. 1.1.4 behaves as alvarezp2000 would expect, doesn't it? So, is this a regression, or a planned change?
FL: The Format - Default formatting functionality has not been touched for OOo 2.0. Furthermore the paragraph style list box in the Text Object Bar contains a new entry "Clear Formatting", which behaves different. Please find details in the following spec.: http://specs.openoffice.org/writer/formatting/Assigning_Styles_in_Writer.sxw Currently there are no plans to change this behavior. Therefore I set the target to OOo later just that the community has the possibility to vote for this issue.
The mentioned document clearly states this as a bug, as it refers to "hard character formatting". According to the document, I should be able to select all the document and ask for "Format -> Default formatting" and have my document completely reset to applied styles, being paragraph, character or whatever else. The new functionality will NOT allow me to do it because it would set all my paragraphs to "Default" paragraph style (see tables around line 130). Therefore it has all my votes and I ask the community to vote for this issue. I ask the developers also to reconsider and understand that this issue is located at the heart of the character stylist functionality.
Will there eventually be a menu entry or button to clear hardly applied formatting **ONLY**?
Yes, please reconsider this. When working on a long document where consistency is important (and I guess many OOo users have this need, even if they do not know it), this is a pretty annoying behaviour. IMHO, character styles are an important part of a document and should not be dissmissed by default. In 2.0.4, the "clear formatting" thingy removes everything, styles and hardcoded formatting, while the "format->default" only keeps paragraph styles, user have still no way to remove only hardcoded formatting :/
Any updates on this issue?
In the process of testing the current snapshot (SRC680_m242), I noticed that Writer now has the behavior requested here: Selecting a paragraph and using Format > Default Formatting removes direct formatting, but does not remove applied character styles. Is this change intentional? I'm afraid it's not clear to me from the spec document (linked above) what is intended for OOo 3, in part because the spec often refers to "hard formatting" without clearly distinguishing whether "hard formatting" includes applied character styles or only direct character formatting. Is there another issue tracking this change? I've had no success identifying a recently-integrated CWS for this change either.
See also issue 85464. Unless I'm mistaken these two issues are saying the opposite of each other. Surely Default should ONLY clear direct formatting (i.e. retain character styles), otherwise how can it be done? Character styles are easily removed by applying default character style - we don't need Default to do that too. That would be at the expense of losing the ability to remove only direct formatting (which is VITAL for cleaning and converting a 'second-hand' document to pure styles).
I have just left a comment on the issue 85464 about reading comments on this one and the flaws in the spec document.
On the first page of Writer Help (Application Help) is a link to "Instructions for Using StarOffice Writer". On that page, under the heading "Using Styles, Numbering Pages, Using Fields" is a link "Undoing Direct Formatting for a Document". That leads to a page which says this: http://documentation.openoffice.org/online_help/htmlhelp/text/shared/guide/undo_ formatting.html Quotes: "You can undo all formatting that has not been made by styles in a few steps." "If you format a document without Styles, it is referred to as "direct" formatting." "You can remove direct formatting from your document by selecting the entire text with the shortcut keys Command Ctrl+A and then choosing Format - Default Formatting." Converting someone else's ODT or DOC to pure styles should be that simple. However tangled the specifications have got themselves, the actual intended behaviour is quite clear. Please reconsider target - considering Writer's developing reputation as a styles based word processor, having to manually re-apply potentially hundreds, or even thousands of character stylings, is a severe limitation.
*** Issue 87420 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***
Any updates on this issue? Some users have already remarked the importance of the issue when handling long documents.
Seems to me we have two needs: 1) remove character styles, 2) remove local formatting (to make document formatting only styles based). Now it seems to me people who want to do 1+2 think it is too much to perform two steps, so people that only want to do 2 do not have a command for it, but have to perform manually hundreds or thousands steps to revert 1. This is rather severe usability problem. Please, raise priority of this issue to revert issue 85464 to fix this one.
Another very surprising and harmful consequence of Format > Default removing applied character styles is that hyperlinks are destroyed because they are based on character styles. The dependence of hyperlinks on styles is not apparent to the user, who never applied any style to create the link, and may not understand or use styles at all, so it is easy to apply Format > Default to reset text formatting and as a consequence also lose all the link addresses without realizing it.
*** Issue 104391 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***
I would like to ask what is it needed to get this bug fixed. Is it just the patch? Is it discussion? Is it clarification on the Styles specification? Is it more users supporting fix of this bug (a. k. a. votes)? Thank you.
The help system says "To reset all direct formatting of existing text, select that text, then choose the menu command Format - Default Formatting." It does NOT actually do this. Instead of "resetting all *direct* formatting" it also removes applied character styles.
Is there any other way to remove hardly applied formatting but keeping the character styles?
This issue is generating a big discussion in the usuarios@br-pt.openoffice.org list (http://br-pt.openoffice.org/servlets/BrowseList?list=usuarios&by=thread&from=2363095).
Finding a solution that pleases all OOo users as much as possible IMHO requires to separate them into users that work with styles and those who don't (that - I'm afraid - most probably are the majority). A user that doesn't use styles will be confused by a command "remove hard attributes" or something similar. OTOH a user working with styles will learn easily how to remove applied styles. So I suggest that we change "Default formatting" so that it does not remove applied styles, as requested. But then we should think about a new name for this function.
This has been fixed in Go-oo. See the following patch: http://cgit.freedesktop.org/ooo-build/ooo-build/commit/? id=197809decd870fc7ec50ffa97bca4f3a0c3ea818 Furthermore, because, it will also NOT remove hyperlinks anymore, we must show 'Remove Hyperlink' even with selection. See the following prerequisite patch: http://cgit.freedesktop.org/ooo-build/ooo-build/commit/? id=e01a6b323311c0896813a0973721d22c551a595e
We already have "remove hyperlinnk" since 3.2 (IIRC). That's a good point, thank you for mentioning it. @fl: shall we keep hyperlink formatting in "Default Formatting" or not? It's worth a consideration, though perhaps people might be used to get rid of hyperlink formatting by calling "Default Formatting".
@mba: Maybe I didn't explain correctly. See discussion at http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/ooo-build/2010- February/000540.html Hyperlinks are not formatting. In essence they alter functionality and not printing. Sure, it sets the text to the Hyperlink style, but that is just a consequence of being a hyperlink. As such, in the patch, "Default Formatting" will NOT clear Hyperlinks anymore. It should NOT. Besides, there is a "Remove hyperlink" already for that, except that the shell is buggy: it doesn't show the option if you have text selected. So, how can you "remove all hyperlinks from the document or an arbitrary text block otherwise"? Shouldn't you simply do "select, right-click, remove hyperlink"? That's what the other patch allows. What I'm trying to say is that even if "Default formatting" wouldn't change, "Remove hyperlinks" should work this other way. We are fixing two different bugs. Now, if they are two different bugs, why is one a prerequisite of the other? Because without fixing the "remove hyperlink" mess, we would leave the user without a way to actually remove hyperlinks from a text block.
Sorry, *now* I'm confused. Before that I thought we are on the same side: "Default formatting" nowadays does not reset the language attribute - that's good. Because of this recent change we now need a new functionality "reset language attribute". This is what this issue is about. "Default formatting" nowadays clears the hyperlink attribute - you consider this to be wrong and I tend to agree (though I'm asking fl for his opinion). And here we already have the necessary extra functionality that would be needed in case we don't clear "hyperlink formatting" when the user selects "default formatting". Of course this would be another issue, but as you brought it up, I didn't see a reason not to answer it.
> Before that I thought we are on the same side: We are. I just exepected a push to "fix" instead of a simple "consideration'. > "Default formatting" nowadays clears the hyperlink attribute - you consider this to be wrong and I tend to agree (though I'm asking fl for his opinion). fl doesn't see this issue as a bug. That's why I don't agree on fl "considering" it. With a "consideration" I foresee 5 more years with the bug open.
I assume that you are talking about the hyperlink (that should be another issue as this one is about keeping character styles when using "format-default" and AFAIK fl is not against that). Well, in a good team (and I hope that we have a good one) it's usual to pay attention to the experts. fl is one of our "UX" experts and so I value his input. And waiting for another 5 years is nothing that should happen: either it's a "let's do it" or a "won't fix".
Hyperlinks are a style (albeit non-obvious) & should NOT be removed by applying default formatting - that should ONLY remove direct (hard) formatting. Styles can easily be removed by applying default character style. At the moment, due to this bug, there is NO way of removing direct formatting without also losing styles.
@fl: In case we don't receive a serious complaint ;-) from your side, I opt for following the suggestion in this issue and keep styles and hyperlink formatting when "format default" is used in Writer. I also would like to change the target at least to 3.x.
*** Issue 112802 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***
It seems that there is no contradiction. The only question that remains is: should we keep the name "default formatting"? IMHO we can keep it, as "default" never was an exact or strict definition for what was happening. And we all seemed to agree that the old behavior was just wrong, the new one would be what is *expected* as a default behavior.