zack's home page/ blog/ posts/ 2007/ 05/ crappy ooimpress styles

Crappy OpenOffice.org Impress Styles

The "GNOME suite" (mainly AbiWord and Gnumeric) is quite nice and I usually prefer it to the bloated OpenOffice.org counterparts. Unfortunately it is missing a good presenter. Yeah, I know, I should use beamer, and I fact I often do for academic stuff, but for quick and dirty presentations, where you care more than you should about visual aspects and WYSIWYG ... I often resort to ooimpress.

It is not that bad, if you can stand its memory consumption and startup time, but for a long time I was convinced that I was wrong about a feature I was not finding in the UI. My reading of the ooimpress manual this morning seems to contradicts this belief.

Here is the simple scenario. I do not play with fonts, the default styles inherited by the master page are fine. I just want from time to time to select some text and mark it as "verbatim text":

  • monospace font

  • remove the bullet/number corresponding to the current outline level

the use cases are those you guessed: markup a shell command, a command output, or a code snippet. Of course I can't stand doing it again and again by hand, having to keep in mind each time the font I chose and its size for ensuring uniformity. I want to use a style.

That's it, nothing less, nothing more. Is it asking too much?

It seems so. ooimpress supports two kind of styles. One type (sorry, forgot the name) can be applied to built-in content types, e.g.: heading1-9, titles, subtitles, .... Changing such a style will affect all slides. Fair enough, that's good. The other type can be applied only to "graphics" elements, including text boxes. Fair enough as well, this way I can change at once all the text boxes or labels I've used in my document.

But wait ... how can I solve my problem now?

I see only two awful ways:

  1. devote a high heading level (e.g. 9) to my verbatim text

  2. use a graphic style

of course, a graphic style can not be applied inside non-floating text boxes and I do not want to use tons of text boxes, especially because they are not anchored to ordinary text

Dear lazyweb, please prove me wrong.