Suggestion: styles management improvements

Suggestions
1

Hi,

ver. 8.0 still lacks - in my opinion - some critical features of style management.

  1. The style box (the list of all available s.) should become dockable.
  2. the styles are currently displayed without any order; In the case there are many of them, one has to waste a lot of time (checking them them one by one) in order to retrieve the desired one;
  3. the character and paragraph styles should have a clear label (“par. s.” and “char. s.”) or icons in order to identify them;
  4. the management of the styles is too much complex. One has first to “select” a specific style, modify its attributes and THEN SAVE THE CHANGES. The latter (saving the modified style attributes) SHOULD BE DONE, every time an attribute is changed. This is the way most word processors behave.

Thank you for your attention

2

Hey @naut1905 :wave:
We’re glad you’re interested in the OnlyOffice product.

Can I ask you to record a video with an explanation, because some points are not quite clear to me?

3

Hi and sorry for the long wait. I was very busy.

What I wanted to point out in my former post regards mostly the Styles management

1.1.Most word processors allows to detach (move) the styles box
from the horizontal top toolbars area in order to make it an independent or/and a dockable window
to be placed for example beside (usually right) of the main document.
This positioning of the styles allows to scroll up and down the various styles INDEPENDENTLY
(i.e. mantaining the last scrolling) from the main document, having therefore a better
overview over them (the styles) and the possibility to apply for example repeatedly the same style
(which remains in the listbox in a “fixed” position) to the main document.
In may opinion this is a crucial functionality and a more convenient way, which is especially useful when
a far amount of styles has been defined.

1.2. Most word processors allows to modify a specific style without the need to save
it every time a modification has been applied to it. At every change the redefined style is automatically saved.

1.3. It would be useful to have the character and paragraph styles clearly labelled (“Paragraph”, “Character”) in order to identify them immediately

1.4. Having a lot of styles requires a way of sorting them (as list) not randomly as in the current implementation,
but at least alphabetically, otherwise one has to scan visually the entire list to find the style he is looking for.
Even better would be having some filters to display subsets of styles (for example just built-in, custom styles, applied ones, etc.)

Best regards

4

Hi @naut1905 :wave:
We already have plans to implement the points you described: 1, 2, 4.

  • Add the ability to sort and pin styles in the style panel.
  • Implement a dialog box for editing paragraph styles.

Regarding the third point, may I ask you to provide a screenshot showing the implementation of this feature in other document editors?