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Style hierarchy seems backwards in this program Thread Tools Search this Thread Display Modes
It's a huge pain that locally applied styles seem to take precedence over general styles, especially when you're copying over material from another program.
Why did OO implement such a counter-intuitive and counter-productive logic?

MS Word makes a lot more sense on this point, I must say.

In my case, I simply want all the Level 3 rows to have the same Font. Why should that be so hard? Since I've copied in the content from different programs, there's a mix of fonts. So, how do I quickly correct all the wrong styles in my document?

Here's OO's note on their backwards hierarchy:

In general, more locally-defined styles take precedence over more generally-defined styles. If you have a whole-document style that sets the font size to 16 points, and a row style that sets the font size to 12 points, the row's text will honor the 12-point style. You can check the Style Attributes inspector to find out the priority of styles being applied to the current selection.
 
Uh, it isn't a universal feeling at all that the style hierarchy is backwards!

Use System Preferences Keyboard & Mouse to swap Edit->Paste and Edit->Paste with Current Style and life will be much easier in the future. After you do that, you should be able to copy the offending material from existing documents and paste it into new rows unsullied by the old formatting.
 
And to get the text you already pasted behaving, you can select all those rows and use the Format -> Clear Style command.

If the style hierarchy was reversed, you could never say, just bold a single word. Or make a single row different from the rest.
 
Derek, I take your point, but there is something that does seem counter-intuitive to me about how OO handles styles.

What would be intuitive to me would be that the latest change overrides earlier changes, whether the latest change is universal or local. In other words, if I set a style that says all Level 3 rows are Italic, then setting a local style on one particular Level 3 row - bolding one word, for example - would override that. But then, making a change at the universal level would override that.

My recollection is that that's how Ecco Pro worked, and it was never a problem - at least for me.

Anyway, that's my two cents.

Last edited by rogbar; 2010-04-28 at 04:43 PM..
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by JimmyMcVideo View Post
MS Word makes a lot more sense on this point, I must say.
But Word works the same way.

If you have a Style applied to a paragraph, for instance, and then select a couple of words and manually apply a different font, that overrides whatever font the Style specifies. Same thing in OmniOutliner with locally-applied styles overriding level styles.

Quote:
In my case, I simply want all the Level 3 rows to have the same Font. Why should that be so hard? Since I've copied in the content from different programs, there's a mix of fonts. So, how do I quickly correct all the wrong styles in my document?
And this is just like Word too. Pasting styled text into a document keeps the style of that text, it doesn't apply the document's styles. You need to do a Paste Special for that. Same thing in OmniOutliner with having to use Paste with Current Style versus pasting normally.
 
In that latter context, I have used the system shortcut assignment preference to swap the keystrokes for "Paste" and "Paste and Match Style/with Current Style" globally, as it is the latter that I normally want in all my apps. Saves a lot of frustration.
 
 


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