Custom character styles in italics not found by [format] italics search

[Earendil]

Hi,
I’ve created several character styles in order to be able to assign them quickly to texts with citations in multiple languages.
This allows me

• to have them correctly hyphenated
• to have them correctly spellchecked
• to have them always visible in the navigation panel on the right (the list in the bottom status line is limited as to the number of languages that are listed there).

Now, I want to be able to review characters in italics without specifying the language. So I am using the search window with the italics Format on. But all those characters that I marked with those custom characters are not found.

Why is that so?

[LeroyG]

Try checking Including Styles.

Works for me. LibreOffice 7.1.8.1.

[ajlittoz]

Unfortunately Find & Replace is rather limited. In particular it is unable to search for character styles. The various check boxes match on direct formatting only.

My suggestion isto reorganise your custom character styles. Since your foreign sequences are probably quotations, make your styles descendants of built-in Quotation.

When you want to see in your document the sequences no matter the language, temporarily change font colour in Quotation (e.g. turn it red). All Quotation and user-“language” will turn red. After your review, restore the color attribute to “neutral” state by pressing Reset to Parent button (Standardt in older releases). Don’t explicitly set it to Automatic if you customised Quotation to depend on another style as it will break the dependency for this attribute.

[Earendil]

@ajlittoz

After your review, restore the color attribute to “neutral” state by pressing Reset to Parent button (Standardt in older releases).

Thank you @ajlittoz, I have been applying what you mention, and it does help if I am doing a visual check.

If I want to look for white spaces and punctuation for example, checking the document with regular expressions (which I almost exclusively work with, having to deal with dozens or more pages with very little typographical mistakes scattered all over), I am back to square 1, unfortunately.

I had a try with AltSearch and Replace alternatively with the new Quotation character style, but it seems that you can either look for the Character style Quotation or a regular expression.

Find & Replace plus direct formatting on the contrary allows for both at the same time.

I think that I will have to use either character styles the way you suggested inheriting from the Quotation character style, or direct formatting plus language code. If need maybe one can always select all direct formatting + language and assgn them a character style in the end isn’t it?

I wanted to ask 3 things:

1. Is the Standardt button you are mentioning the one at the bottom of every pane (Organiser, font, font effect, etc.)? This means that one has to click the standard button in each pane where he did a modification, right?

2. If I do so (by mistake) in the Font pane, of the Quotation character style I had modified, the italics is gone, and it selects regular, although the standard Quotation character has the italics. This seemed strange to me.

3. I thought I had the latest stable version (I expected to find a Reset to Parent button), but I suspect that there are newer versions out there.

Thanks again,

Version: 7.1.8.1 / LibreOffice Community
Build ID: e1f30c802c3269a1d052614453f260e49458c82c
CPU threads: 8; OS: Mac OS X 10.16; UI render: default; VCL: osx
Locale: it-IT (it.UTF-8); UI: en-US
Calc: threaded

[ajlittoz]

1. Standard allows you to reset the attributes in each tab separately. Thus, if you changed only the font colour, you don’t need to press the button in other tabs unless you want to reset them too.
2. The Font tab is perhaps the most misleading of all. When you press Standard, the attributes are all reset to “not explicitly set” (rather than to parent’s value as suggested by the new button wording). In this tab, there is in fact no binary-valued attribute. Fonts come in multiple variants. Weight is not limited to simply regular/bold (Univers is known for offering a “continuous” degree of “grease”). Slant may provide several angles. And finaly, italics, per classical definition, is not a matter of angle but a difference in shape (which is limited only by imagination). With such a choice, there is nothing like a “standard” setting. And Writer does not know how to show an “inherited” state, all the more in list.
   So, after pressing Standard, consider what is shown as a lie: neither the font face, its variant or size is the true value. Language cannot be trusted either.
3. My version, coming from the Fedora distro, is 7.2.5.2+ and I expect it to change soon to 7.3.x. In 7.2.x, Standard was changed to Rest to Parent which is better as Standard was not really descriptive for what it did, but display should be improved to emphasize the “inherited” state of attributes.

[Earendil]

@ajlittoz

So, after pressing Standard, consider what is shown as a lie: neither the font face, its variant or size is the true value. Language cannot be trusted either.

Thank you @ajlittoz! Everything is quite clear. There is still one thing that puzzles me: the behavior of the Standard button.

I did test opening a different character style and then pressing Standard. This is what happens in the character style window to Strong Emphasis—the same happens to the character style shown in the document: the bold is gone and Regular has been applied.

Is what you say about display and it being untruthful to what the character really is, limited to the small window in the character style window, or does it show incorrectly in the document itself?

If the button Standard is behaving correctly, there should be a parent of Strong Emphasis with the typeface Regular…

[ajlittoz]

As you can see with Hierarchical view of styles, all built-in character styles have no parent. Pressing Standard erases all explicitly set attribute, reverting to “transparent” or “inheriting” state. Since there is no parent, this is equivalent to not overriding the current state, i.e. the one set by the current paragraph style. If you press Standard in all tabs, you end up with the same as fake No style character style.
The problem here, like with paragraph styles, is a shortcoming in the display: there is no visual clue that an attribute is neither set nor reset, i.e. its value is inherited. The display is not tri-state: set, reset, inherit. It does not represent in any way the latter state.
The only reliable display of style attributes is shown in the Organizer tab where only the explicitly modified attributes are listed. And even here there could be glitches like “Not italic” instead of “Regular”.
There is no formatting error when applying a style, only what is displayed in the style dialog cannot be trusted 100%.

[Earendil]

Thank you. As far as I understand then the section of Character styles is still developing.
I miss a way to revert to what was initially foreseen for a particular character style. Setting quotation and strong emphasis character style to standard for example I probably made quotation Regular instead of Italics, and strong emphasis Regular instead of Bold. But I am using my memory and I could have missed some other settings. I tried to use Reset in both cases, but they just stay Regular.

[Earendil]

Thank you @ajlittoz checking Including Styles is in fact the solution!

[ajlittoz]

Reset is just another faux ami. It only resets the whole style to its state when you entered the dialog. It doesn’t revert to some factory state. So if you customise the style and press OK, you change this style. Next time you want to modify it, if you change your mind in the middle of modifications and press Reset, you’ll just discard the current changes and revert to the document saved state (which is not factory state).
To recover factory settings, create a blank document and import styles from it with override.
For what I know, character styles are rather mature and I haven’t heard of any development on them.