This is my opinion how styles should be handled in OpenOffice.org. My idea is that everything is done only once. When a style has been defined it does not have to be done again. At the moment, handling styles in OOo and in MS Office is not accurate. I could say it is not even professional. Styles can be done badly in many different ways, and you cannot always see, what you have really done.

This is the one thing that should be more accurate than it is now. And thats why I want to change things. I start it by defining an object called Style object.

Style object is the very basis of each style. Each style is an style object even though they may have different properties.

Style object consist following properties

• Name
• Native style properties
• Inherited style properties

Name differences style objects from each other.

Native properties are those properties which are handled straight by style object. For instance Color style object handles RGB values straight.

Inherited properties are those properties which are already handled by another style object. Property values cannot be changed straight. For instance Gradient style object has inherited style properties from Color style object. Inherited styles are handled only by their name. If user wants to change the properties of inherited style, he must change the corresponding style, where the properties are native.

This convention is used through the whole document.

Now I define few graphical styles. This isn’t definately a complete list and the style properties are not complete, but gives you a hint what I’m getting at.

These are the style objects which have only native properties

These style objects begin to have inherited properties.

These styles begin to be more usable than the styles above, but still these are only styles, not graphical objects.

Ok now, this is the thing I have been defining those graphical styles. Now making objects is quite easy.

A comment about transparency. As we can now see, transparency is defined in two places, in Graphical object and in Shadow style. Now we should define that how does the transparency of an object affect to its shadow’s transparency, or does it. Here I think that shadows and object’s transparency does not affect each other. But this should be discussed about.

Text is obviously other thing, and after thinking about it, It seems to me, that it is an mistake to combine everything in a same "text style" because it forces to combine things that does not belong together. So, I define styles needed be text

This is how to use them. The main thing is the paragraph style. When user selects paragaph, a default character style, bullet style, and ruler style are assigned for use from the paragraph style. Then within the paragraph, user can change the character, bullet and ruler for more individual use, without compromising the paragraph handling.

Hopefully you understand what I’m getting at.

This is not real inheriting as in graphics, but here I mean that a character style can be made based on some other character style, or paragraph style can be made based on some othen paragraph style, etc.

It is already used in OOo and MS Office, but it lacks with accuracy. User must know what property the new style is inheriting. So, for each style, there is a property which tells, from which style it is based on. And then for each style property, there is an option which tells, whether the property is inherited or not. Naturally, if style isn’t based on anything, inheriting is impossible.

First of all, I think stylist should be able to dock on the side of the window. At least in my monitor, Stylist is many times so big, that it goes over the text I’m writing. Of course, I can close it, but then I cannot use it well. It should be in use, but not above the text I’m handling.

So, all the graphical styles, and text styles are categorized in Stylist with handy popup menus etc.

As I told you earlier, this is not complete but these are my ideas, hopefully you like them.