Character Styles and Fields? Does anyone have a macro?

nrubdarb · Power User Joined: 03 Jan 2006 Posts: 52

Hello!

My problem: I have defined many User Fields for my document, and now I would like to give them all a certain character style.

However, OpenOffice Writer does not search Fields, which means that I cannot automatically search and replace character styles for these Fields.

Does anyone have a macro to hand for searching User Fields, basic functionality would be, in pseudocode:

jeanweber

nrubdarb · Power User Joined: 03 Jan 2006 Posts: 52

Hi Jean,

Thanks for the help! Some more research results from my efforts...

AutoText does retain style information, which is in itself a very useful feature. This even seems to apply if you style an AutoText entry with a style which is only present in the current template and then use it somewhere else.

By which I mean, that the following works (somewhat surprisingly perhaps):

1. Open a document or template and make a new, custom style.
2. Mark some text and give this text your new style.
3. Make an AutoText entry from this (making sure that you do *not* check the 'text only' box!)
3. Close document.
4. Open a new document, *not* based on this template if the document in 1. was a template.
5. Open your AutoText with Ctrl-F3 and insert your AutoText entry made in 3.
6. Writer inserts the text, and also inserts the style with it. This also seems to mean that it inserts parent styles if required, which is quite interesting!

I have only tried it with paragraph styles, so YMMV. I inserted a second-level head style, which was based on a first-level head, and ended up with the text styled correctly and with two new styles in the target document.

However, styles aren't my only problem with AutoText.

I am working with networked authors, and need to create AutoText entries based on text sourced from outside Writer, for example from a terminology database. As I have written in another post, I therefore need to be able to *generate* AutoText, and without knowing how the AutoText file (one of those '*.bau' files) is put together, I currently cannot do this. I have given up with User Fields, since these cannot be 'networked', and anyway, it's an unnecessary step. If I could generate AutoText files, then I could have my text and styles as I needed them, in one go.

And of course, being able to generate AutoText from one of our online resources here at work would be very very useful indeed, meaning I could get some real interoperability with these systems.

The only thing I have found which works is exporting the entries I need as a Writer index concordance file and then using that to create the Glossary I require. I might post that on the Forum in a day or so once I have got it working as desired. It doesn't of course solve my problem with *entering* the entries, but it does let me locate what I already have in the document!
_________________
OOo usage is v.2.0, mostly Writer. At work I'm evaluating OOo as a solution for publishing product manuals. OS is Windows XP. At home I use OOo for all kinds of text processing. My partner will be writing her thesis using Writer. OS is Debian Linux