Local character formatting preserved on style/var. change

[Bill]

As we exchange ideas and perspectives, new ideas evolve. This thread lead me to another potential solution to preserve local formating, while not making drastic changes to the present style structure.

Don points out that if you make a new paragraph style which is not linked to any character style, then you can change paragraph styles and the local formatting can be preserved.

Well, that's a partial solution to avoid wiping out local character formatting, but it still leaves the problem that changing character styles can wipe out local formatting that wasn't meant to change.

So lets expand on the idea of not linking character styles.

As I mentioned previously, within the character style properties, some items should generally be consistent throughout the sentence structure in a document, (i.e. font, size, direction), and other items should only be used for local changes to a few characters or words. (i.e. face, position, line, highlight).

A method to not link a local character style is to simply provide an "ignore" option for an appropriate character style attribute.

For example, let's take the character position attribute within character styles. Currently, there are 3 options - normal, superscript, and subscript. Perhaps there could be a 4th option - ignore. The ignore option could ignore the position attribute when changing character styles.

This solution seems like it would be easy to implement, it allows users that like the current style setup to use the program as they do now, yet it would go a long way towards ending the awkward issue of wiping out local character formatting when changing styles.

[rpcameron]

The whole point of styles (as I understand them) is to easily produce consistent looking documents. Paragraph styles rightfully address paragraph characteristics, but the next level down is the sentence - not individual characters, and this is where the bulk of the issues/problems arise with respect to style variations.

I understand your desire for a "Paragraph" or "Span" type of style to be added. However, this type of meta-style has already been discussed previously (under the auspices of multi–lingual spell checking). You may want to browse through that thread for a more comprehensive discussion of this level of styling.

One of the points I raised in that thread is that paragraph breaks are relatively easy for the application to determine (because anything between two line breaks is a paragraph), but "sentences" are not. What do you use to determine as a sentence boundary? Different languages (and even locales) use different conventions (i.e., French spacing versus the typical—if dated—practice of starting a sentence with 2 spaces instead of one used in the US). Also, the program cannot rely solely upon the stream of characters entered because a stream is not always consistent.

Also, to add to confusion, you have CJK languages where there may not be any whitespace in a paragraph at all. These are all technical hurdles to cross in order to implement something akin to a "sentence" style. While I feel that it would be great to have, there are many obstacles to this. (Furthermore, the performance hit on the application would be huge, since the application would have to constantly scan the document for set sentence boundaries.)

A processing system (like LaTeX or ConTeXt or any TeX derivative) does not suffer from this because tracking a stream is not an issue, as the formatting is not interactive like in a word processor, which is why things such as this are easier (if you can call it that) in those situations.

[Mart°n]

At the moment every possible combination of pasted-in styled text does generate a new style, correct? So, assembling a document from other sources requires exactly the manual cleanup process you describe.

Maybe we speak of something different. Currently, you are the only one who could create styles in Mellel. A style is not meant as the way a word (or sentence) looks like but as a defined style with defined characteristics. You could create a Character-Style that uses Arial 10pt, regular face, black color. If you apply those style to any text, the text will be shown with those characteristics. If you select one word of your sentence and change the font to Times, this would be called an ad hoc format that won’t lead to a new style. So if you copy 20 pieces of text from 20 different sources, they could have their own formatting (as it was in the source) but that would lead to 20 styles.
I don't know if you’ve worked with styles (namely Character Styles) yet but it’s much easier, if you apply your pre-defined styles to those 20 pieces of text with the File › Replace Styles… command to apply a uniform look to your document than to crawl to the Character Styles Setup window and check which Style/Variation uses what attributes. If every new text would lead to new character styles with various variations automatically, you could hardly get an overview and the objective of styles (to get an streamlined look, speed up your work and to ease the way of changing this look consistently throughout your document) would totally be
messed up.

If Mellel had that system and text pasted in from the clipboard was converted automatically, then Mellel's superior styles could co-exist with apparent seamless use of standard shortcuts and text from other applications. I think this would really improve usability for new users.

I agree, something like this would be very helpful to me. What if it didn't have to have perfect fidelity to the original styling, for example if it matched pasted text to the closest existing style and variation? The command could be something like "Paste matching styles..." and this could be an option also in replace styles and when importing RTF.

Wow, that'd be great...

Bryce

I think (but may be wrong) that such an automatic replacement only could work for very simple style setups and could easily lead to more chaos than it could solve. Given the case you’ve set up 3 character styles with 4 variations each:

Headline: Helvetica, 18pt [regular | bold | italic | bold italic] all black
Normal text: Helvetica 10pt [regular | bold | italic | bold italic] all black
Quote text: Helvetica 10pt [regular | bold | italic | bold italic] all grey

now you copy some text from a web-page that uses
Times, 14pt, dark grey with regular and bold face.

How should that piece of text transformed to one of your styles? Not only it has characteristics that could be pressed in any of them. But how should Mellel know if you like to use this pice of copied text as a quote, as a regular text or if it would be the ideal headline?

[Mart°n]

The whole point of styles (as I understand them) is to easily produce consistent looking documents. Paragraph styles rightfully address paragraph characteristics, but the next level down is the sentence - not individual characters, and this is where the bulk of the issues/problems arise with respect to style variations.

I think the true problem is simply that you could loose something, in this case it’s the character formatting of text that doesn’t use styles. If you generate this text via copy & paste from other applications or by using the ancient shortcuts doesn’t matter. If you apply a style to such a piece of text, the sub-formatting (font faces as bold and italic, colors, position as superscript or adjusted baseline, other information as ligatures or the letter case are lost and hard to get back if you don’t notice that loss fast enough.

The current character style is a mixture of some stuff that generally pertains to entire sentences, and other stuff that generally pertains to words or characters within a sentence. For example, font, font size, and direction are attributes that should generally be consistent throughout the sentence structure, while superscripts, subscripts, strikethroughs, and faces are generally meant for just a few words or characters.

As already mentioned by someone else, it’s not only hard to identify a sentence as such. Also, there aren’t any character properties that are connected with a single sentence. If you write in different languages (English/Hebrew), you have to change the direction of a sentence in the middle of it, if you like to fine-tune your look, you may change the font size of bold characters to a minimal smaller value than the regular one, if you write with two different fonts (in multi-language use) you also may like to use different font sizes to equalize the overall look of both fonts. So neither of the mentioned values (font, size, direction) are consistent among a single sentence. They could be and are in most situations but not necessarily.

However, it's not so fine for a change in paragraph or sentence style to have an impact on any specific variations made to characters within a sentence.

It all depends on how you’ve made those changes to your characters. If you’ve made them with Variations (Sub-Character-Styles) the changes would not be lost. If you’ve made them via the palettes or ancient shortcuts, they will be lost as Mellel doesn’t know how to preserve them. But if I work entirely with styles, I would like to see all characters to change according to my style, how else could I be sure that all parts of my work are styled the way I like. If I change the character style, all portions of the text should be changed according to the new style. Everything else makes the styles thing obsolete.

If there were sentence styles in Mellel's menu, then we could make a word red or gray or have superscripts, subscripts, or whatever, and have the ability to change the sentence style without wiping out individual character or word variations.

While I don’t think that a “sentence” is the right level where character options should (and could) be split up, I agree that there are some things that could in theory be moved to a separate style level. Those things are all the options, that could be applied independent from the font and the font face (color, position as superscript or baseline adjustments, outline, underline, strike through and the like). However, there are also arguments why one should connect them to a font. But even if you push those settings into a new “sub sentence style”, the problem of loosing font faces (as bold and italic) couldn’t be solved by that action.

[nicka]

I think the true problem is simply that you could lose something, in this case it’s the character formatting of text that doesn’t use styles. Whether you generate this text via copy & paste from other applications or by using the ancient shortcuts doesn’t matter. If you apply a style to such a piece of text, the sub-formatting (font faces as bold and italic, colors, position as superscript or adjusted baseline, other information as ligatures or the letter case are lost and hard to get back if you don’t notice that loss fast enough.

Yes, this is the problem in an nutshell. It is quite a bad problem, in my opinion, since information that the user expects will be preserved is eliminated without warning in a way that makes it hard to recover it. I think the aim should be to minimise such loss while keeping Mellel's superior style system essentially intact.

With ad-hoc formatting generated in Mellel, the solutions seem easier. Allow a preference to turn off Command-i, Command-b etc. Or (preferably) allow the user to reassign them to character style variations. They will not work quite the same as in other applications (not toggling) but it would eliminate a lot of accidental generation of ad hoc bold and italics.

With pasted text from other sources, a solution would involve auto-formatting text as it comes in. If a find-set could be automatically applied to any pasted text it would be possible to corrall most formatting into a character style variation. This might be made easier by a large number of default character style variations covering the permutations of plain text, italics, bold, underlined, sub- and superscript.

I do not think that there is any mileage in any solution which proposes that some character formatting should be invulnerable to (some) character style changes. That is the way towards apparent inconsistency when applying styles: the Word nightmare.

[cyberbryce]

At the moment every possible combination of pasted-in styled text does generate a new style, correct? So, assembling a document from other sources requires exactly the manual cleanup process you describe.

Maybe we speak of something different. Currently, you are the only one who could create styles in Mellel. A style is not meant as the way a word (or sentence) looks like but as a defined style with defined characteristics. You could create a Character-Style that uses Arial 10pt, regular face, black color. If you apply those style to any text, the text will be shown with those characteristics.

I think we do speak of something different, but only because you've interpreted my words "differently". I do use Mellel's styles extensively, and "Replace Styles...", etc. I used "style" in my post to refer to global as well as document styles and their ad hoc changes, which is consistent with the terminology used in the guide. I interpret part of your response as just explaining how the current styling system works. I'm sorry the terminology I used threw you off, I think...

If every new text would lead to new character styles with various variations automatically, you could hardly get an overview and the objective of styles (to get an streamlined look, speed up your work and to ease the way of changing this look consistently throughout your document) would totally be
messed up.

I was never proposing the automatic generation of new global styles of any sort.

I think the whole thrust of this discussion was to find a mechanism for reducing the difficulty of re-styling text that comes from an external or imported source. In particular, often times imported or pasted paragraphs have a consistent font but several character style features that would correspond to what (in Mellel's global styles) are called character style variations. One most often wants to apply a consistent character style to these paragraphs, with variations used appropriately, and that is very tedious and error-prone at the moment -- whether you do it by going through each bit of text, or by using "Replace Styles..."

If Mellel had that system and text pasted in from the clipboard was converted automatically, then Mellel's superior styles could co-exist with apparent seamless use of standard shortcuts and text from other applications. I think this would really improve usability for new users.

I agree, something like this would be very helpful to me. What if it didn't have to have perfect fidelity to the original styling, for example if it matched pasted text to the closest existing style and variation? The command could be something like "Paste matching styles..." and this could be an option also in replace styles and when importing RTF.

I think (but may be wrong) that such an automatic replacement only could work for very simple style setups and could easily lead to more chaos than it could solve.

First, let me emphasize that I was thinking of something optional. I do agree on second thought that the option to match all all pasted paragraph and character styling to styles that already exist may not work too well. However, what about automatic matching just to variations of an existing character style?

How should that be transformed into your existing all Arial, 12pt, black, different faces (bold, italics, underline, strikethrough…) style-set? Would you only like the faces to be transformed (bold into bold, italic into italic) and the (sometimes more important) font, color, size information to be dropped? Or should a complete new style be generated with the separate formattings pushed into different variations? How much time will you need then to clean up your final document, if you have to squeeze 30 totally different styles into a single one because you’ve copied different snippets of text from 30 different web-pages?

1) Perhaps much of the issues you raise here would be resolved instead by more limited option: "Paste matching current style." With this you would be telling Mellel to use the current paragraph and character styles, and asking it only to select a variation for each bit of text. This requires much less "guesswork" about the desired form of each bit of text: if it is bold and there is a bold variation in the current character style, then the presumption would be that you want that text assigned the bold variation in the current character and paragraph style. Further, if something doesn't match, it could be assigned to a new document character style, just as currently occurs (again using the terminology of the Guide). Perhaps it could also be temporarily "highlighted" or otherwise indicated in that case. Let me emphasize again that this would be just a particular new menu option for pasting text in, not a change across all ways of pasting text in.

Now that would not address imported text, and of course the "Replace Styles..." feature might be another way to achieve the same end. However... I find that I can only effectively make partial use of "Replace Styles..." in its current form when I'm working with a document pasted together or imported from an external source. I can only use it for easy cases. The basic problem is that, without seeing the text to which you might apply an existing style (global in this case), how do you know which one to apply? The formatting palette in Word is I think much more effective for this purpose (gasp), because it selects all of the text with the same style. In the end, I often end up assigning styles erroneously in Mellel when I try to guess the intended use and hence the appropriate style to re-assign to a particular combination of font, style, etc. displayed in "Replace Styles..." Further, since I don't recognize some of the document styles that need to be replaced, I usually end up subsequently going through the document paragraph by paragraph re-applying styles. This leads to the very problem with variations that I think motivated this thread. To avoid that problem, I also have to look for every deviation from the main character style used within each paragraph, even if the font is the same.

2) So, besides the idea of "Paste matching current style" with visual feedback for cases that aren't matched: I think an improved Replace Styles system--where you could see the text to which you are applying paragraph and character styles and character style variations--might greatly ease the process of re-styling text.

Bryce

[Mart°n]

I think we do speak of something different, but only because you've interpreted my words "differently". […] I interpret part of your response as just explaining how the current styling system works.

Thanks for clarifying. I’ve thought of both possibilities but want to get sure, that we mean the same thing as it make a huge difference when it comes to cleaning up a document. I work that less with document styles that I’ve already forgotten that they are called styles too.

I think the whole thrust of this discussion was to find a mechanism for reducing the difficulty of re-styling text that comes from an external or imported source.

If I understood the posters of this thread correctly, there are at least three problems to solve.
Number one is the ability to match the current input behavior (CMD + b) to styles as some prefer the ancient shortcuts.
Number two is something that prevents the loss of information for any kind of users (especially beginners) who may start working with ad hoc formatting (document styles) and experience huge problems if they try to start with using styles (either paragraph- or character styles) as existing information gets wiped out by using them.
Number three is to ease the process of re-styling content from other applications, either by opening non-Mellel files or by using copy & paste to bring in something new.

As for number 3, I’m completely with you and think there are huge improvements needed. However, I couldn‘t imagine that most of the “solutions” offered for number one or two really would ease the thing for beginners. It would change things to something that seems to be more convenient but I doubt this really is the case.

If Mellel had that system and text pasted in from the clipboard was converted automatically, then Mellel's superior styles could co-exist with apparent seamless use of standard shortcuts and text from other applications. I think this would really improve usability for new users.

First, let me emphasize that I was thinking of something optional. […] However, what about automatic matching just to variations of an existing character style?

Your suggestion doesn’t sound too bad. That could be a helpful tool if you already work with styles and know how to use them. The reason why I’ve raised an objection was the last sentence from Nicka. I (currently) don’t think that an “replace all document styles by some existing styles/variations” would be helpful for beginners. Matching document styles to variations of the currently used one "Paste matching current style" also would not help new users but those of us that already work with styles.

1) Now that would not address imported text, and of course the "Replace Styles..." feature might be another way to achieve the same end. However... I find that I can only effectively make partial use of "Replace Styles..." in its current form when I'm working with a document pasted together or imported from an external source. I can only use it for easy cases. The basic problem is that, without seeing the text to which you might apply an existing style (global in this case), how do you know which one to apply?

2) So, besides the idea of "Paste matching current style" with visual feedback for cases that aren't matched: I think an improved Replace Styles system--where you could see the text to which you are applying paragraph and character styles and character style variations--might greatly ease the process of re-styling text.

I’m completely with you. I think the lack of visual feedback in the Replace Styles… window have been discussed before an this is a major issue. You should not only be able to see the text you like to change (which would require something like non contiguous selection) but also limit the replace action to some lines/paragraphs as you may like to apply different styles to different paragraphs even if they use the same document style.
A similar (more simplified) window could pop up (on request) if you paste some text into your document (Paste and replace styles) giving you the ability to assign styles right when you paste something in.
The option to preview the final result as well as to undo your action right in this window are necessary too.

But while those improvements to Mellel will help to solve or partially solve the problem number 3 (as outlined above) the other two still remain.

[nicka]

Matching document styles to variations of the currently used one "Paste matching current style" also would not help new users but those of us that already work with styles.

I see your point. Don't you think that shipping Mellel with some default character style variations would get round this? Or are you opposed to that for independent reasons that I haven't understood (sorry)?

[Mart°n]

Matching document styles to variations of the currently used one "Paste matching current style" also would not help new users but those of us that already work with styles.

I see your point. Don't you think that shipping Mellel with some default character style variations would get round this? Or are you opposed to that for independent reasons that I haven't understood (sorry)?

The reason why this doesn’t help and couldn’t be solved completely (or to a “acceptable” level lays in Mellel’s style system that works with variations. That is something that no other app provides and it’s a more complex (or more powerful) system of doing things. With a “matching current style” feature, you try to map a simple scheme to a complex one and that is not very likely to work. One example:

Let’s assume we (or the Redlers) create one (or one hundred) Character Styles with various variations. As we know, Mellel only has 8 variations available in one Character style. While this is 8 times as much as other word processors have, the number is too low to allow a seamless matching of styles. Let’s try to fill that variations with something useful:

1. Helvetica regular
2. Helvetica bold
3. Helvetica italic
4. Helvetica bold-italic
5. Helvetica regular superscript
6. Helvetica regular subscript
7. Helvetica bold superscript
8. Helvetica bold subscript

If the new user “Joe Newbie” tries to write something in Mellel, the above Characterstyle will be used as he doesn’t know how to change styles and of what use that may be. So he writes and uses his known shortcuts (CMD+B, CMD+I) and the results will automatically converted into the variations 2 and 3. Everything is fine. He copies some text from other sources and those formatting also will be transformed into the variations. Until now, everything seems to be fine for pro users as well as Joe Newbie. Sometimes later (or earlier) he tries to switch styles as he has paid for that feature so it’s only logical to try it (or if he haven’t paid, he may try it anyway because he uses Mellel in trial mode).
As most other Character Styles delivered with that new version of Mellel use the same variations, switching Character Styles is a funny thing an it seems to work.
The problematic thing is, if either a copy&pasted text uses one style thing that wasn’t set up in the variations (for example underline) or Joe Newbie tries one of the fancy features of the Character Appearance palette. That may be underline, strikethrouch, baseline shift, color, outline or anything else you could think of. If that specific option could not be matched to the pre-defined variations, it will be lost the next time Joe Newbie tries to switch the styles. One may argue that the most important things are still there (as bold and italics) but Joe Newbie doesn’t know what causes the problem as he doesn’t know the necessary details about styles, variations and the automatic matching tool. To him, the experienced behavior looks like a bug. Maybe he tries some more things and finally he trash Mellel as it doesn’t seem to work.
Not every user starts to read the manual in this case, write a mail to the developers or looks into a forum/usergroup. It looks like a bug and the behavior is unpredictable for the unknown user. Will italics remain after a style change, or the color, small caps or underline? The font size, the face or a baseline shift? You also could not workaround this with millions of pre-defined character styles as allows you to change zillions® of variables.

The very same problem of some unpredictable behavior won’t be noticed by the knowing user as he knows what he could expect from that automatic style matching mechanism and he (maybe) knows that it’s a good idea to take a look at the “replace styles” window to see if there are any unwanted temporary document styles that could be harmed by style change. That’s something Joe Newbie doesn’t know.

Maybe I’m wrong with my thoughts or somebody else has a idea that could ease the use of Mellel for both, the beginners and the advanced users.

[cyberbryce]

This isn't really a thorough response, Mart°n, but maybe it goes part of the way:

- For new users, the problem is partially alleviated by having "Paste using current style" (mapping text styling to its variations, as discussed above) be an explicitly different menu item under "Paste Special".

- Similarly, I think any re-mapping of standard character combos could be made not the default behavior, but an option that is selected.

So, these enhancements are important but I think the new user who plunges into "ad hoc" styling should get what (s)he expects. Those of us reading this are probably here because we eventually figured the styles thing out. (Well, sort of...)

Bryce

P.S.: Another angle to address these concerns is via visual feedback. Perhaps there could be an option to mark text that is not assigned to one of the variations of the current character style during the special paste.

Actually, in general, there might be a view setting that temporarily reveals all text (as if it had a marker applied) that either has a document style or a "changed" (+) global style.

[Mart°n]

This isn't really a thorough response, Mart°n, but maybe it goes part of the way.

I’ve tried to describe my point of view, why this option isn’t that helpful for new users as a response to nicka’s question. I’ve also pointed out, that delivering some (or some more) pre-defined styles wouldn’t make it much better. This doesn’t affect the usefulness of such a option for advanced users.

So, these enhancements are important but I think the new user who plunges into "ad hoc" styling should get what (s)he expects. Those of us reading this are probably here because we eventually figured the styles thing out. (Well, sort of...)

If I go back to the first postings of this thread, my impression was that some users that don’t use styles extensively are searching for a solution to mix styles with ad-hoc formatting without loosing the ad-hoc information when you change a style or variation. In my last post, I’ve tried to evaluate if the “paste matching current styles” feature would be a good solution to this problem and this kind of users (mixing styles and ad hoc manually). My personal conclusion to this could be read in the post above.

However, this doesn’t mean, that this feature isn’t useful for those who figured the style thing out…

P.S.: Another angle to address these concerns is via visual feedback. Perhaps there could be an option to mark text that is not assigned to one of the variations of the current character style during the special paste.

Actually, in general, there might be a view setting that temporarily reveals all text (as if it had a marker applied) that either has a document style or a "changed" (+) global style.

Yeah, visual feedback is what I miss most. Yesterday, I’ve worked with a Mellel file from someone else and I’ve tried to clean up some unused and ad-hoc styles but it was much harder than I’ve thought. Without a visual live feedback & preview, the replace styles window is close to useless, if you have to clean up other peoples work. (It works well for my own work as I have a clue when and for what reason I’ve used an ad-hoc style and because I know what’s behind the name of my styles, so I could “see” them without a preview. Working on documents from other people is not a real pleasure in this case. Some improvements to this are really needed, but I’m not really sure, if this is the “pro users needs some sophisticated improvements” or the “ad-hoc stylers won’t loose any formatting by applying a style” thread. Maybe tomorrow I could read the comments again but now I need some sleep.

[rpcameron]

I think part of the crux of this discussion has finally been mentioned (at least as far as I can tell): some wishes with to have styles and ad hoc formatting both, and have them live in harmony.

I don't believe this is something that can easily be attained (from a technical standpoint), nor something that should be worked towards (from a personal standpoint). Perhaps the one part of Mellel (second to its beautiful typography) that keeps me using it is the amazing style system. Sure, it has some shortcomings and ways in which it can be improved, but in any case it's still better than the alternatives.

(Just as a note, the idea of matching Cmd+{B,I,U} to style variations is a bad idea IMO. I think the best thing to do would be to completely disable those shortcuts; Mellel relies upon its style system, and those legacy shortcuts do not have a place in Mellel's style. Just because many people don't want to think differently when they have learned some shortcuts is no excuse to perpetuate bad behaviors. Mellel does not function well in an ad hoc manner, and by removing those shortcuts, I feel that more confusion would be saved that created.)

[cyberbryce]

If I go back to the first postings of this thread, my impression was that some users that don’t use styles extensively are searching for a solution to mix styles with ad-hoc formatting without loosing the ad-hoc information when you change a style or variation.

Working on documents from other people is not a real pleasure in this case. Some improvements to this are really needed, but I’m not really sure, if this is the “pro users needs some sophisticated improvements” or the “ad-hoc stylers won’t loose any formatting by applying a style” thread. Maybe tomorrow I could read the comments again but now I need some sleep.

I think part of the crux of this discussion has finally been mentioned (at least as far as I can tell): some wishes with to have styles and ad hoc formatting both, and have them live in harmony.

I'll grant you both that we may have started in one place and arrived at another. But, with the exception of Bill's recent post, you will note that the discussion repeatedly focused on something else: how can we avoid ad hoc styling?

If Mellel were to offer more features directed at this, these could only enhance its functionality as a word processor focused on structured text editing.

I view the idea of having a "Paste using current style" feature as an extension of the existing "Paste plain text" feature--only one which applies the character variation corresponding to the incoming text, as available.

No word processor has a feature like this, to my knowledge. While I can't speak for others, this would substantially improve my ability to achieve the goal of inputing information into Mellel in a structured form. It would allow me to avoid introducing document styles, unintentionally, altogether.

I don't think its wise to speculate about the technical feasibility of something in a program developed in someone else, but the proposed feature obviously requires no fundamental structural changes. The current system already parses all of the incoming text to create document styles.

Many of the other ideas proposed in this thread--default style variations, customization of keyboard shortcuts and visual feedback--are all directed at avoiding "ad hoc" styling, contradicting your claims, and these are again all consistent with the current styling system. For example, the current system uses the first variation as the default.
[Edit: what I meant was, the current system uses a "plain" character appearance as the default]

Bryce

[nicka]

I think part of the crux of this discussion has finally been mentioned (at least as far as I can tell): some wishes with to have styles and ad hoc formatting both, and have them live in harmony.

I don't believe this is something that can easily be attained (from a technical standpoint), nor something that should be worked towards (from a personal standpoint).

Agreed. And my suggestions are based on the idea that the two cannot co-exist, and its best to get pasted text into styles as easily as possible, and make it as easy as possible for new users (and absentminded ones like me) to never apply ad hoc formatting.

Perhaps the one part of Mellel (second to its beautiful typography) that keeps me using it is the amazing style system. Sure, it has some shortcomings and ways in which it can be improved, but in any case it's still better than the alternatives.

Agreed again. Well, and the fantastic new bibliography suppport. And the outlining.
But the style system really is very good. The best thing about it, in my opinion, is its total reliabiliity and consistency. As long as you don't have ad hoc formatting, you always know what is going to happen when you apply a style, and it always happens. That is so much better than the mess in Word.

Just as a note, the idea of matching Cmd+{B,I,U} to style variations is a bad idea IMO. ... Mellel relies upon its style system, and those legacy shortcuts do not have a place in Mellel's style. Just because many people don't want to think differently when they have learned some shortcuts is no excuse to perpetuate bad behaviors.

Here, though, I don't agree. Those shortcuts don't generally mean "apply ad hoc italics/bold/underline". They simply mean "apply italics/bold/underline". And it's not just a matter of learned or legacy shortcuts. Those are the shortcuts that work in every text manipulation program there is and all the ones there have been on the Mac since the beginning. They even work on PCs (with 'control', of course).
So style variations are the only sensible way to do italics etc. in Mellel 99% of the time, and given how fundamental the Command-i/b/u shortcuts are, I really think it makes good sense to allow them to be assigned to style variations.

[rpcameron]

Just as a note, the idea of matching Cmd+{B,I,U} to style variations is a bad idea IMO. ... Mellel relies upon its style system, and those legacy shortcuts do not have a place in Mellel's style. Just because many people don't want to think differently when they have learned some shortcuts is no excuse to perpetuate bad behaviors.

Here, though, I don't agree. Those shortcuts don't generally mean "apply ad hoc italics/bold/underline". They simply mean "apply italics/bold/underline". And it's not just a matter of learned or legacy shortcuts. Those are the shortcuts that work in every text manipulation program there is and all the ones there have been on the Mac since the beginning. They even work on PCs (with 'control', of course).
So style variations are the only sensible way to do italics etc. in Mellel 99% of the time, and given how fundamental the Command-i/b/u shortcuts are, I really think it makes good sense to allow them to be assigned to style variations.

Actually, if Mellel honors the legacy Cmd+{B,I,U} shortcuts but applies them to a variation, they will not do what happens in every other application. In other applications these shortcuts are toggles that switch the status of the formatting option on or off. In Mellel—to be in keeping with its style system—these would match to variations. Style variations and on–the–fly toggling of styles attributes don't really coexist. It is for this reason—different style paradigms—that I feel the Cmd+{B,I,U} shortcuts should be removed.