Creating inline text styles

[Deane]

How do I create inline text styles in Draw? These are styles that affect the way text looks at the individual word or character level, but do not affect entire paragraphs.

Examples are bold or italic text -- you can apply this to a single word in the middle of a sentence and not affect the words around it. This word is red, but these words are not, etc.

My application --

We're using Draw to make wireframes for Web pages. I've created a "Hyperlink" style to denote hyperlinked text (it's blue and underlined). However, I can't just apply this to a single word -- it wants to apply to the entire paragraph.

[acknak]

You can manually apply direct formatting at the character level, but there are no character styles in Draw or Impress, unfortunately.

There are graphic styles, but they bundle together every aspect of a graphic object's appearance, including text options. Since these apply to the object, the entire text for particular object will have a uniform appearance.

Now, what's a "wireframe" for a web page? You mean a mockup to play with the page design?

I've used Draw for that. I just don't prototype it down to the extent of including every link. I put a couple in and just use the manual formatting. It's good enough for a prototype.

The only app in OOo that has decent styles and good control over the styling of hyperlinks, is Writer. Since you can add graphics to a text document, I don't see why you couldn't use Writer to do prototyping.

[Deane]

Thank you for the reply.

I have tried in Writer, but I can't seem to be able to apply any styles inside of a textbox.

I draw a textbox on the screen, enter some text, highlight it, but no styles will apply. And the styles dropdown on the formatting toolbar is inactive as well.

Can you apply styles to text in textboxes, or are they in a world of their own?

[BillP]

Are you using the Text tool on the Drawing toolbar to draw the "textbox"? This is not the same as the "Text Box" tool in Word. To insert a text box in Writer, use Insert > Frame.

[Deane]

That was it. Thank you.

[acknak]

Sorry, I wasn't very clear about that: no, text boxes are graphics objects and are mostly in a world of their own. I imagine it is a leftover from the way OOo was originally designed, but it is very frustrating to have two similar items (text documents and text boxes) that share a great deal of functionality but are missing key features and having different bugs and problems). Since so much of Writer is involved with laying out text in boxes, you would think that the fundamental capabilities would be shared, but they're not.

E.g, I was just playing around with copying styled text from Writer into Draw. It almost works, but not for hyperlinks. Grr.

The "OpenOffice.org" is a real hyperlink, and uses the "Internet Link" character style, but pasted into Draw, it loses the formatting and instead is styled according to Tools > Options > OO.org > Appearance.

The word "hyperlink" has the "Internet Link" character style, and retains the formatting when pasted into Draw, but it is not a real hyperlink.

You could use Writer to style your text, and use a character style for the links, then paste into Draw for the mockup. It hardly seems worth the trouble.