Format / Paragraph corrupts existing formatting

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jeffbronks
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Format / Paragraph corrupts existing formatting

Unread post by jeffbronks »

It would be nice if you could select multiple paragraphs that have different formatting, and then change just one parameter (like, say, keep with next) without messing up the existing formatting. H&M4 seems not to be designed to cope with this situtation.

When you click OK in the Paragraph dialog, it forces all the selected paragraphs to have the same format, which is some sort of lowest-common-denominator of the formats of all the selected paragraphs. The most obvious result is that the indents of some of the paragraphs change.
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Tim Green
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Unread post by Tim Green »

Hi Jeff,

If you select paragraphs and apply formatting then all the formatting that you select will be applied. There is no way that this can be changed, that's the way the editor works...
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Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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jeffbronks
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Unread post by jeffbronks »

Tim Green wrote:If you select paragraphs and apply formatting then all the formatting that you select will be applied.
Yes Tim, but what about the formatting that I don't select? Word processors like MS Word, despite their many failings, handle this intelligently. I just tried it. In Word, I created three paragraphs with different indents (by dragging the Left Indent slider on the ruler), selected them all and did Format Paragraph. Some of the fields in the Format Paragraph dialog were blank, indicating that multiple paragraphs with different properties were selected. I then ticked 'Keep with next' and clicked OK. As I expected, Word preserved each paragraph's unique indent and just applied the 'Keep with next' property to each of them. All other editors that I can think of behave in this way.

I then tried the same with H&M, but when I selected Format Paragraph the program presented a Paragraph dialog filled in with the settings from the first paragraph of my selection. There were no blank or greyed-out fields to show that I had selected multiple paragraphs with different settings. I ticked 'Keep with Next' and clicked OK. H&M reformatted all my paragraphs to be like the first one, thereby wiping out their various indents. A bit more experimentation showed that paragraph alignment was also wiped out, and that the paragraph chosen to populate the Paragraph dialog was not always the first one. I also found that the Format Font dialog had a similar problem.

Now I realise that this is a big change to ask for, and perhaps it will never happen, but I still think that H&M's behaviour is wrong. Who knows, perhaps the developers just forgot to tick the "Allow multiple settings in dialogs" box in the compiler. :wink:
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Tim Green
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Unread post by Tim Green »

Hi Jeff,

I've passed this on to the developers and will let you know when I get an answer. However, saying that the formatting is "corrupted" is really a misnomer. When you apply formatting to multiple paragraphs nothing is getting corrupted, you are simply applying all the attributes to all the paragraphs. I suspect that this may be a restriction of the editor engine -- remember that however much Help & Manual may look like a word processor it is not a word processor. Also, the current functionality of programs like Word is the result of many years of work by a team with hundreds of programmers. :?
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jeffbronks
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Unread post by jeffbronks »

OK Tim, thanks for discussing this. I'm prepared to downgrade 'corrupted' to 'predictably but inconveniently modified' if you think that's fair.

I entirely agree that HM4 Is Not a Word Processor, and I certainly wouldn't want it to become bloated, but if this limitation could be fixed within the existing structure of the program then I would be delighted.

I'm surprised that nobody has raised this issue before. Am I using the program in the wrong way? I tend to notice this problem when I want a chunk of text to stay together. I select all the text and set 'Keep with Next', but as you now know this breaks the formatting. The workaround is to set 'Keep with Next' on each paragraph individually, or at least per group of identically formatted paragraphs.

Anyway, I'm still a fan of HM4. It does everything else well.

All the best
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Martin Wynne
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Re: Format / Paragraph corrupts existing formatting

Unread post by Martin Wynne »

jeffbronks wrote:It would be nice if you could select multiple paragraphs that have different formatting, and then change just one parameter (like, say, keep with next) without messing up the existing formatting.
Hi Jeff,

You can do this by selecting the paragraphs, and then clicking the "keep with next" toolbutton on the toolbar.

If you look at the resulting XML, you will see these paragraphs now have a setting:

Code: Select all

page-break-after:avoid;
but all other paragraph settings remain unchanged. You could add this manually in the XML if you prefer.

The official solution to your problem is to create two versions of every style, the second one derived from the first but with only the "keep with next" setting changed. If you are not careful your style list becomes yards long, and it's difficult to remember all the variations.

regards,

Martin.
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jeffbronks
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Re: Format / Paragraph corrupts existing formatting

Unread post by jeffbronks »

Martin Wynne wrote:You can do this by selecting the paragraphs, and then clicking the "keep with next" toolbutton on the toolbar.
D'oh! I forgot about that button. It does indeed work as expected. It was my fault for trying to do it the hard way.

Tim: I still think that the dialog should preserve format variations but, now that Martin has solved my immediate problem, I shall let sleeping dogs lie.

Thanks to both of you for your help.
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Tim Green
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Unread post by Tim Green »

Thanks to Martin for pointing this out -- I personally almost never use toolbar buttons and so I tend to forget about them... I think things like this tend to depend on what computer era you grew up in. I started with CP/M and DOS (actually my first computer was the Sinclair ZX81, which I built from a kit...) and my instincts are still always to look for a command rather than a button...
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Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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Alexander Hompe
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Unread post by Alexander Hompe »

Maybe Jeffs problem is a bit similar to this one?
http://helpman.it-authoring.com/viewtopic.php?t=4837
(http://helpman.it-authoring.com/viewtopic.php?t=4834)
I would be glad if the behavior of the text/paragraph settings could be changed in H&M5.

Regards,
Alex
Help & Manual 6 Professional Edition
Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit
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Dean Whitlock
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Unread post by Dean Whitlock »

I've assigned the Keep with Next command to a shortcut key (Alt+N) because I use it often. It does not appear to change any format settings other than Keep with Next, and it works like a toggle, switching the attribute on or off, depending.
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Tim Green
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Unread post by Tim Green »

Dean Whitlock wrote:I've assigned the Keep with Next command to a shortcut key (Alt+N) because I use it often. It does not appear to change any format settings other than Keep with Next, and it works like a toggle, switching the attribute on or off, depending.
All formatting commands that are available via the Toolbar work without changing any other formatting in the selected text.
Regards,
Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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