Rationale for the Style Enhancer project - Waidanian/style-enhancer GitHub Wiki

This project was started as part of an effort to assess the merits and possibilities of OpenOffice Basic and the OpenOffice/LibreOffice API. The higher goal is to support the OpenDocument format with poweful tools that allow for fine-grained control of all aspects of this excellent format’s style model.

A fundamental concept of the OpenDocument specification is that it describes a hierarchy of styled objects. Consequently, it is crucial to possess tools that allow one to work efficiently with styles and give them first-class treatment. Historically, OpenOffice and LibreOffice have had varying levels of support for different kinds of style-related tasks. Third-party plugins and extensions have long been used to supplement the tools provided by the application’s default configuration. However, no single all-encompassing solution has emerged.

This is where the Style Enhancer comes in. This extension is meant to make the following tasks more efficient:

• Searching for manual (direct) formatting and replacing it with appropriate styles;
• Combining multiple advanced search and replace options to determine the styling of certain constructs according to arbitrarily complex conditions;
• Modifying existing styles and specifying property inheritance, which is especially important given OpenDocument’s heavy reliance on inheritance;
• Processing many styles at once;
• Analyzing style usage in documents;
• Importing and exporting individual styles or whole style sheets;
• Making lists of styles and of their properties, with the possibility of producing an OpenDocument Text or plain text document containing exhaustive information about a document’s styles. This can help in the creation of style guides or formatting guides.