When preparing a long document, styles are useful. But when changing a style's
elements (font, size, kerning, etc.), especially a whole bunch of elements,
knowing how changing will affect the document's total length would be very
helpful. A behind-the-scenes calculation without displaying the look would save
time and would show whether a combination actually lengthens when a doc is
already too long. That's a common layout problem.

For example, suppose you've carefully crafted a slew of photo captions to just
fit exactly. You're told to switch fonts. Rather than try out a bunch of
font-and-size combinations and look at every single photo caption in a 50-page
memo with every style change, it would be nice if one could specify an alternate
style definition and have OOo tell us if no caption would be longer than it is.

This could be tried on a sample user-typed text in a dialog or on all instances
of the style in the file. We'd want to know if the effect is to shorten, to
lengthen, or indeterminate, where indeterminate would be explicitly defined as
plus or minus some small percentage with a suggestion that the user examine all
indeterminate instances. Telling us that it is shortening or lengthening by a
percentage would be even more helpful; for instance, a shortening by 40% might
be too much.

If it lets us visit each instance of the style in the document by hopping from
one to the next without having to see what's in between, we can see the effect
immediately. The Find function may already have the necessary code to do that.
Then, if we can flag any instance of a style, we can revisit those that looked
bad and skip the ones that were okay.

Not calculated would be hand-tuned character strings, such as a different font
for one character. By saying they're not calculated, you could pre-explain
anomalous results. A bonus would be Writer identifying where hand-tuning seems
to have been performed, and judging effects only on all other noncontiguous
instances of the style.

I'm using OOo Writer 2.4.0 without Java Runtime Environment on Linux Fedora Core
4 on a Pentium 4 laptop. I didn't see this feature.

Thank you.

-- 
Nick