chris jensen (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} observatorium) wrote,@ 2005-10-12 14:08:00 |
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Open Office Migration
I've recently decided to try making the switch to open office, with the upcoming release of version 2.0. For my purposes, it seems to have a lot of potential, but the learning curve has proven steeper than I'd hoped for. As I'm prone to forget how to solve the various challenges I've faced thus far, I'm going to try documenting them here. In no particular order:
1. The Style Manager governs all.
Never forget this. If you're planning on working on a decent sized document, don't even bother trying to change things willy nilly using the font size, style, and so forth on the menus at top. That will only lead to headaches down the road. The Style Manager governs character formatting, paragraph formatting (which includes character formatting of its own- not sure this was a good design decision as it could lead to confusion; I just mirror paragraph and character formats to be safe, which I probably don't need to do). It also governs page layout, including margins, lists (you can create your own list styles!), and whatnot. In that sense, it's very CSS-like. The result is that you must use these styles religiously. This also means that a good template will serve you well. I'm not quite sure what happens when you create a document from a template and later change a style within the template, if that gets reflected back into the document. But, since I'm only using my template for one paper, I'm not terribly worried. On the subject of the style manager, I found that sometimes my custom styles didn't appear at random times. This appears to be a minor UI glitch that is easily solved by selecting another style category and then going back to the first. It's more likely that I'm really seeing the wrong category in the list box, but I've not given it enough though to investigate. No worries.
2. Modularity and Master Documents
My current paper is a survey of the background work needed for my future dissertation on discovering open source software development processes. It has certain sections, an early outline of which appeared on this journal. I decided that since they are in decent depth of their own, to make them chapters. Now, rather than have one long and complex document, it seemed a master document would be a better way to go, with subdocuments for each chapter (and, of course, the title page and references). This led to a several hour project to try to get the pagination and page formatting correct. It happens that page styles from imported documents into a master document aren't applied when the documents are imported. Nor do page breaks. There are ways to hack this using Text sections, but that's not the right way to solve the problem. The right way to solve it appears to be using paragraph styles. Since I wanted the title page to have thick margins on top and bottom (rather than using lots of newlines), I had to specify that the first paragraph style on the title page (in this case, I'd defined a paragraph style for the title itself) begin with a page break (styles & formatting->Paragraph Styles->{Style Name- in my case, Title}->Modify->Text Flow->Breaks, Insert Page Before, with Style {Title Page Style}). Double-clicking on the Title Page style in the Style Manager won't do it. Thus, if you want your first chapter to also start on a different page than the title page, you need its opening paragraph style to specify that it starts on a new page (with the appropriate page style for a chapter, or in my case, the first page of the chapter, since it has a different style than the rest of the pages in the chapter- no header and a thicker top margin; in this case, I had to specify that the {Chapter Page 1} style is followed by the {Chapter Page} Style and I believe this is done in the page styles section, rather than the paragraph styles section, but don't quote me on it). Also worth noting is that the master document styling supersedes all styles defined in subdocuments.
3. Headers and Footers
A nifty feature of open office that I couldn't figure out so easily in MS Word is how to select which pages get headers. In open office, however, you can specify whether a page style has a header or footer. I know it's possible in both Word and Open Office to have separate sections of page numbers for separate sections of text (e.g. use roman numerals for the preliminaries [such as the preface] and arabic numerals for the body of the work [starting again at 1]). I figured out how to do this quickly in Word, but I haven't yet figured out how Open Office does it (though, importing the Word document kept the numbering faithfully). I don't need this particular functionality for my candidacy survey, but I will for my dissertation. If I figure it out, I'll post it here.
4. Adding an underline to an entire line of text (without using spaces)
Style Manager->Paragraph {Select desired style}->Modify->Borders
5. Indenting a paragraph
Don't mess with tabs or the margin ruler at the top of the page. Stick to the style manager here too. That's all for now. I'll update with more as I go along. There are also several sites that do a decent job explaining how to use OOo, and forums for the gotchas. But if you remember only two things, remember Styles! and Templates! Word allowed me to get away without these (and frankly, they only got in my way), but no more.
I've recently decided to try making the switch to open office, with the upcoming release of version 2.0. For my purposes, it seems to have a lot of potential, but the learning curve has proven steeper than I'd hoped for. As I'm prone to forget how to solve the various challenges I've faced thus far, I'm going to try documenting them here. In no particular order:
1. The Style Manager governs all.
Never forget this. If you're planning on working on a decent sized document, don't even bother trying to change things willy nilly using the font size, style, and so forth on the menus at top. That will only lead to headaches down the road. The Style Manager governs character formatting, paragraph formatting (which includes character formatting of its own- not sure this was a good design decision as it could lead to confusion; I just mirror paragraph and character formats to be safe, which I probably don't need to do). It also governs page layout, including margins, lists (you can create your own list styles!), and whatnot. In that sense, it's very CSS-like. The result is that you must use these styles religiously. This also means that a good template will serve you well. I'm not quite sure what happens when you create a document from a template and later change a style within the template, if that gets reflected back into the document. But, since I'm only using my template for one paper, I'm not terribly worried. On the subject of the style manager, I found that sometimes my custom styles didn't appear at random times. This appears to be a minor UI glitch that is easily solved by selecting another style category and then going back to the first. It's more likely that I'm really seeing the wrong category in the list box, but I've not given it enough though to investigate. No worries.
2. Modularity and Master Documents
My current paper is a survey of the background work needed for my future dissertation on discovering open source software development processes. It has certain sections, an early outline of which appeared on this journal. I decided that since they are in decent depth of their own, to make them chapters. Now, rather than have one long and complex document, it seemed a master document would be a better way to go, with subdocuments for each chapter (and, of course, the title page and references). This led to a several hour project to try to get the pagination and page formatting correct. It happens that page styles from imported documents into a master document aren't applied when the documents are imported. Nor do page breaks. There are ways to hack this using Text sections, but that's not the right way to solve the problem. The right way to solve it appears to be using paragraph styles. Since I wanted the title page to have thick margins on top and bottom (rather than using lots of newlines), I had to specify that the first paragraph style on the title page (in this case, I'd defined a paragraph style for the title itself) begin with a page break (styles & formatting->Paragraph Styles->{Style Name- in my case, Title}->Modify->Text Flow->Breaks, Insert Page Before, with Style {Title Page Style}). Double-clicking on the Title Page style in the Style Manager won't do it. Thus, if you want your first chapter to also start on a different page than the title page, you need its opening paragraph style to specify that it starts on a new page (with the appropriate page style for a chapter, or in my case, the first page of the chapter, since it has a different style than the rest of the pages in the chapter- no header and a thicker top margin; in this case, I had to specify that the {Chapter Page 1} style is followed by the {Chapter Page} Style and I believe this is done in the page styles section, rather than the paragraph styles section, but don't quote me on it). Also worth noting is that the master document styling supersedes all styles defined in subdocuments.
3. Headers and Footers
A nifty feature of open office that I couldn't figure out so easily in MS Word is how to select which pages get headers. In open office, however, you can specify whether a page style has a header or footer. I know it's possible in both Word and Open Office to have separate sections of page numbers for separate sections of text (e.g. use roman numerals for the preliminaries [such as the preface] and arabic numerals for the body of the work [starting again at 1]). I figured out how to do this quickly in Word, but I haven't yet figured out how Open Office does it (though, importing the Word document kept the numbering faithfully). I don't need this particular functionality for my candidacy survey, but I will for my dissertation. If I figure it out, I'll post it here.
4. Adding an underline to an entire line of text (without using spaces)
Style Manager->Paragraph {Select desired style}->Modify->Borders
5. Indenting a paragraph
Don't mess with tabs or the margin ruler at the top of the page. Stick to the style manager here too. That's all for now. I'll update with more as I go along. There are also several sites that do a decent job explaining how to use OOo, and forums for the gotchas. But if you remember only two things, remember Styles! and Templates! Word allowed me to get away without these (and frankly, they only got in my way), but no more.
