[WrongSizeGlass]

Coming from my background as a web developer, I find the styles system works a lot like CSS, in which styles are applied hierarchically and fall back (or cascade) from the most specific use (a particular selection of text) to the most general (the entire document).

To be honest, I really don't want to use OOP to work on web pages, or deal with OOP documents as if they were web pages.

It was stated earlier in this thread that there is no way to remove bold or italic from a particular level or selection of rows because there isn't a "not bold" or "not italic" attribute

What I said was I can't make a Style "not bold", not that I can't 'remove' bold. I can manually remove bold, but I cannot set a predefined Style to be "not bold".

Let's say you set all level 2 rows to "bold", but for one particular set of level 2 rows (all the ones under a specific level 1 heading), you want to remove that.

There is a huge misconception that we all want to have all text within a section or group of sections related by level, etc, to have the same Style. When I make notes within a document to be changed/added/reasearched/etc at a later date, I don't want it to be the same Style as the rest of that section ... or even that subsection of that section (and so on). I want to be able to make the note stand out, and hopefully convey what has to be done with it based in part on its style attributes.

The essential problem seems to be that you have to *apply an additional rule* in a situation where what you really want is to remove a rule.

That is part of the problem. Adding extra steps to undo things you don't want to do in the first place is making it more complicated.

Since the average user has problems understanding the subtle details of how a hierarchical style system works

As a professional programmer for 24 years, I am in no way, shape or form an 'average user'. The implication that those of us who "don't find the Style implementation intuitive" just don't understand it is ridiculous. Yes, it is hierarchical, for most - but not all - style attributes. And yes, it applies those style attributes hierarchically most of the time. And yes, you can get the end result you want by removing attributes you don't want instead of being able to define a style with the attributes that you do want. So yes, I understand it.

Perhaps the bugs and inconsistent implementation of some style related features make it frustrating. Or maybe it's the hierarchical nature of it, or it's flexibility and complexity. Maybe it's all of those things. But no matter what the reason, it is still frustrating trying to get the simple things done. And for the "average user who doesn't understand the subtle details", well, that's what we are trying to do - to get the simple things done.


James B