Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 57028
Cascading character styles
Last modified: 2013-02-07 22:32:23 UTC
At the moment, character styles can be defined to inherit attributes from other ones but this must be done explicitly. This proposal is to allow character styles that will inherit all attributes from the surrounding text, unless these are exoplicitly changed: that's the the way that styles work in the CSS model. Cascading character styles would be especially useful in multi-lingual documents. Since the language of a word is, in OOo, an attribute of its characters, we want a quick way to make certain sections as being in language "A" and others in language "B". This can be kludged with paragraph styles, but since the distinction between languages is orthogonal to the kind of distinctions that paragraph styles are meant to mark, each paragraph style has to be replicated in all the document languages. So a document using three langauges and four heading levels needs fifteen different styles defined, ten of which differ from others by only their language. This is a lot of work and very fragile in collaborative environments. If "language" were defined as a cascading character style, it would be possible not just to mark up sections of the document quickly and easily with it, which can be done through the character formatting menu already, but to change the font or display of text in any language just as is possible with proeper styles now. This is a request that arises from a long discussion about the difficulties of using OOo in a multi-lingual environment. The background can be found here: http://www.openoffice.org/servlets/BrowseList? list=discuss&by=thread&from=1102780
Reassigned to requirements.
See issue 15265.