semantic styles

As usual when work presses, I bubble over with brilliant procrastination. Here’s a bit. Now that OOo has an invisible attribute for text, an MS Word style outliner is just a bunch of macros away. The only hard bit would be making the toolbar to list the levels you want shown or hidden.

But in the mean time there is already the opportunity to do semantic highlighting. There is an icon on the main toolbar which paints selected text with a highlight colour by changing the background colour. Instead of that, just make a set of character styles which have these colours, but informative names: the example that occurs to me is when you have a bunch of quotes on different subjects that you want to pull out of an interview transcript. They could be colour-coded by subject (or, from a different sort of transcript, by speaker). So the coloured styles are named for the meaning they convey. Then a macro goes through and extracts all the quotes of a particular colour into another file, or, if you’re me, ecco.

I already have, and use for
analysis, a system where bookmarked sections are highlighted and pulled out like this. But at the moment they are organised by bookmark names. Colours and style names are quicker and clearer.

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