Colorizing text styles

[Petar Petrenko]

Hi,

I do some coding from time to time and not so long ago I got and idea. (Almost) all Code Editors use colors to indicate statements, functions, quoted text... So, is it enough interesting to you, to implement this idea in Publisher? It would be something like this:

1. Assign a color indicator next to the style name;
2. Apply the color to paragraphs or characters as a text background or text color.

This way we can easily find parts of text that have no text style assigned, or have wrong text styles.

These colors must not be exported to PDF or other formats and must not be printed on paper. Only for redaction purposes.

[walt.farrell]

So, like the existing colors that you can assign today, except only as an indicator. And in Preview mode (or Exporting or Printing) they would disappear? That's an interesting idea.

[Oufti]

A workaround could be to use alternatively two stylesheets (with paragraphs or characters styles defining which color to use): one for editing, with vivid colors, and a second for printing or exporting, with all the colors set in black. 

Before printing or exporting, you would have to import the adequate style sheet, replacing the present one. 

 

[walt.farrell]

3 hours ago, Oufti said:

Before printing or exporting, you would have to import the adequate style sheet, replacing the present one. 

Interesting idea for a workaround, Oufti, and in a brief experiment it works. You do need to make sure that you have a document of a different name to import the final styles from. And, of course, if you have made any changes to the Text Styles that you want to retain, since you saved that "final styles" document, you need to update the "final styles" document with them. So there are some easy ways for this approach to fail.

But I like the idea and your lateral thinking

[fde101]

A parallel concept might be that of a style variant.

We can already base styles on other styles: for example, if I have a base style named MyStyle, I might create another style which inherits from it and simply changes the text color to red, maybe MyRedStyle.

Now consider having a "Style Variants" panel with a list of variant names and a "Default" or "[No Variant]" option already present as part of the document - names might be "Screen Display", "Printing", "Proofing", etc. - and being able to create a "Variant Style" as a child of either a paragraph or a character style, which rather than having a name of its own, would inherit the name of its parent but with one of the defined variants associated with it.  When the user selects a variant name in the Style Variants panel, any styles that have a variant style as a child which are associated with that selected name, would have that variant substituted for the base style; any that do not would simply use the base style.

This generalizes the concept and allows for quickly reformatting the text in the document for different purposes by making a selection in the variants panel.

[Petar Petrenko]

7 hours ago, Petar Petrenko said:

1. Assign a color indicator next to the style name;
2. Apply the color to paragraphs or characters as a text background or text color.

A little bit of clarifying:
Indicator color should be editable with option to switch it on/off and automatically applied to the text formatted with that style.