Hi,
In markup languages like HTML and LaTeX (for which LO has export filters), ‘emphasis’ and ‘strong emphasis’ don’t necessarily mean ‘italic’ and ‘bold’. You may prefer not to use them to call explicitly the italic or bold variants of the current font (or automatic substitutions).
Unfortunately, in LO they are the only built-in styles that give italic and bold font variants. If you want to be sure to get italic and bold, as well as other variants (small caps etc), you have to create your own new styles. User styles can make your work less easy to follow by other participants, and they might not be picked up by export filters, which are increasingly being used.
Quite rightly, LO is making an effort to get us to use styles (character styles here) instead of direct formatting. This is just good practice; there may even be a good case for having an option to hide the direct formatting functions (recalling the practice of removing the GOTO command from ancient versions of BASIC).
‘Emphasis’ and ‘strong emphasis’ are confusing for people who may not be too computer-literate but who need to make documents that are ready and reliable for export, for example, to different publication formats. A complete set of built-in font-variant styles would help beginners, and also provide a consistent framework for the design and use of export filters.
20 March 2015
In response to oweng, ‘emphasis’ and ‘strong emphasis’ were given non-committal names because people writing web pages and so on in X/Html were expected to want to re-define them as anything they like (nowadays usually in the CSS). LO and odf naturally continued with this convention, and users can redefine them by modifying the styles. But if you do that you then have to make user styles to get italic and bold, or use direct formatting; both of these options should be discouraged if possible. The present arrangement is possibly OK for (as the name implies) office software, but now people are taking their stuff to professional printers; for example you can have one copy of your book beautifully printed for a few euros. LO isn’t meant to be good enough for that but it’s a great engine for writing and exporting, for which direct formatting and user style kludges are a serious hindrance.
In typographical circles, ‘emphasis’ is a switch (I don’t have enough points to upload a LaTeX screenshot): if you use it in Roman text you get italic, and if you use it in italic/emphasised text you get Roman. Italic, bold, small caps etc are separate styles or markups that refer directly to font variants if they exist. I argue that they are common enough to be defined explicitly as built-in styles.
22 March 2015 Today’s comment by oweng on ‘default’ versus ‘text body’ styles highlights a difference between, to take the two extremes, hand-coding a web page and typing a document into a word processor. I’m trying to look further than my original question, and ask whether the web-like style management and application facilities of Writer are appropriate for an end user who would be happier with a more friendly (stylish?) front end. Many of us still use direct formatting and also get confused with the interaction between styles and the menu when, for example, trying to change defaults for lists (replacing bullet symbols and so on).
In large enterprises the IT department sets up a collection of templates; if those people are nice they will provide a set of controls to call up the styles. This would not work for the rest of us because everyone has different needs. Very few LO templates are available to download, presumably because of this but also, perhaps, because possible contributors don’t want to display their ignorance…
For what it’s worth, I propose that the tabbed window presentation of the style structure might better be displayed as some kind of organisation chart that maps the underlying code directly. That way, the end user could see directly the point where (for example) a font is first defined, and where it is subsequently varied. Ideally, the chart would self-adapt so all available variants of a font would be automatically available downstream of its declaration.
Writer 4.4.1.2 and earlier, Windows 7 & 8.1 and sometimes Ubuntu or Lubuntu (for which my printer is too old).
Export to pdf and TexLive (LaTeX, editor TexStudio), copy-paste to Scribus, playing with export to ePub.