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Organising Paragraph Styles


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6 hours ago, robinp said:

I’m sorry but I don’t buy the ‘more options are better’ argument

Hmm, I didn't say more is better. I said you have options to organise your styles the way you want.

Perhaps, you should give it at least a try. :)

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1 hour ago, Seneca said:

Hmm, I didn't say more is better. I said you have options to organise your styles the way you want.

Perhaps, you should give it at least a try. :)

I was paraphrasing the gist of what you were saying. Sorry if it came across as me directly quoting you. 

I have given it a go. Not sure what gave you the impression I hadn’t? I just don’t underestand the doubling up of this feature. It is confusing and I genuinely can’t see a solid reason for it. 

Can you give me an example of a use case where havingboth ‘based on’ and ‘group styles’ would of benefit?

@Chris_K @MEB maybe one of you could explain what the intention is? Thanks. 

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13 hours ago, robinp said:

But isn’t that exactly what the ‘based on’ feature achieves?

No, not exactly. As @Dave Harris explained here, Group styles are purely organizational and are not intended to be applied.

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1 hour ago, αℓƒяє∂ said:

No, not exactly. As @Dave Harris explained here, Group styles are purely organizational and are not intended to be applied.

Thanks, so I really can’t see what a ‘group style’ would do that a folder structure wouldn’t do, but folders seem much more flexible.

A group style does less than a basic style that others are based on because a group style can’t actually be applied.

A group style cannot contain disparate styles in a way that allows you to organise by document section or type (as I noted above)

It seems to me that group styles are superfluous and effort and UI space would be better devoted to a folder or tag system for organising styles.

Is there a single use case where a group style does more than a basic style that others are based on?

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14 hours ago, robinp said:

I’m sorry but I don’t buy the ‘more options are better’ argument  it is just bad design to have two features that essentially do the same thing.

We don't have two features that do the same thing. We have one feature, Based on, that can be used two ways: to share formatting, or to organise styles. We also give styles a type, Character or Paragraph, which determines whether they are applied to characters or paragraphs by default, and we have a third type Group which means neither, for styles which are not intended to be applied - that are just for sharing or organising.

The gist of the comments here is that people want it to be two features rather than one, because using the same feature to do two essentially different things is too compromising.

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On 9/14/2018 at 2:23 PM, MikeW said:

Dave, can existing styles be add to a style group? 

I hope I understand your question correctly.

But as soon as you base your style on a style group that style will be added to that group. Did I get your question right?

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On 9/15/2018 at 12:23 PM, Dave Harris said:

We don't have two features that do the same thing. We have one feature, Based on, that can be used two ways: to share formatting, or to organise styles. We also give styles a type, Character or Paragraph, which determines whether they are applied to characters or paragraphs by default, and we have a third type Group which means neither, for styles which are not intended to be applied - that are just for sharing or organising.

The gist of the comments here is that people want it to be two features rather than one, because using the same feature to do two essentially different things is too compromising.

OK, understood.

But it still doesn't really explain the purpose of Group Styles.

They are a poor way to organise because it necessitates selecting the Group Style in the Based on setting, thereby meaning you can't actually base the style on on something else; and I can't see why having a Group Style not being able to be applied is actually a feature? How is that better than just a normal style?

For example, if I go back to my example previously:

Main styles:

  • Heading 1
  • Heading 2
  • Body
  • Bullet list
  • Number list

Appendix styles

  • Heading 1
  • Heading 2
  • Body
  • Bullet list
  • Number list

To set up the above, you would have two Styles or Group Styles called 'Main' and 'Appendix' and then set the individual styles as Based on the Styles or Group Styles.

However, you might want the appendix body style to be based on the main body style and the Appendix Bullet list to be based on the Main Bullet list. With the Group Styles system (feature?!) I can't see how that would be possible because doing so would move the Appendix Bullet list to be 'under' the Main Bullet list in the hierarchical view.

Essentially, folders or tags would be hugely more flexible and useful. Personally, I would ditch Group Styles and replace with something useful and more flexible.

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On 9/17/2018 at 2:02 PM, robinp said:

Essentially, folders or tags would be hugely more flexible and useful. Personally, I would ditch Group Styles and replace with something useful and more flexible.

I agree for groups, not tags. It would be another step (adding them/modifying them/getting them updated) that would take longer than dragging/creating in a floder. And where/how to display them? A larger studio or style's names + tags on 2 lines? :S 

"Based on" and "Groups" should be dissociated, since the hierarchical view is only usefull when creating/modifying styles. It's for conceptual work (at the begining, and when doing a lifting to a document).
People working day to day with those styles need Groups when styles are used on specific parts (clicking in the text, highlighting a style of this part will show/open the group folder containing all the styles for this part.

Having the character styles in the same studio can be a problem too if they end up at the bottom while your paragraph styles are in the upper part.
Ususually you don't need to have dupplicates of character styles: bold/italic/bold italic work for most of the paragraph styles, and some are specific depending of parts of the document or depending of type.
Some can be hidden in folders when used inline (bullets, drop caps, initial words), and other can be listed to be easy to choose.

If you assign shortcuts to styles so people working on a lot of different documents could easily visualize them, you should be able to look at paragraph and character styles at the same time if checking shortcut is needed (avoiding scrolling in a list).

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22 hours ago, Wosven said:

I agree for groups, not tags. It would be another step (adding them/modifying them/getting them updated) that would take longer than dragging/creating in a floder. And where/how to display them? A larger studio or style's names + tags on 2 lines? :S 

I think there could be clean and easy ways to arrange it so that tags could work. The advantage they have over folders is that any given style could have multiple tags so you could arrange them in numerous ways depending on what you're working on at the time. Could be really powerful.

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