Intro to OpenOffice.org Styles
- Introduction and Getting Started
- Paragraph Styles
- Working with Paragraph Styles
- Working with Page Styles
- Finishing Up
Paragraph Styles
This section covers how to apply styles to your Document, it may seem to be a little tedious, but once you apply paragraph styles to your document you can do some really cool features. Remember that once you learn how to use styles, you don't have to "style" your whole document, you just style it as you write it.
Marking all the text as "text body"
Now that you actually have the Constitution in your document, we are going to start marking different paragraphs use different "styles". The first thing is we will want to do is mark all of the text as "text body". We do this because the majority of any text you will want to mark as "text body". So, simply click on Edit -> Select All to highlight all of the text, then apply the "Text body" style by selecting it from the "Apply Style" drop down list.
Set all the text to "Text Body"
Showing the Stylist
Open the Stylist Using the Toolbar
To make it easier to work with styles, OpenOffice.org has the "Stylist", a dialog box showing all of the styles available to use. This dialog can be moved wherever you want on the page and can also be "docked" anywhere within OpenOffice.org. Go ahead and open the stylist by clicking on the "Styles and Formatting" button on the toolbar. Once the stylist is open, go ahead and move it around, then dock it along the right edge of the application.
The Stylist "Docked" on the Right Side
Adding the Title and Subtitle
The next thing we will want to do is to add the Title of the document. What you will need to do is place the cursor at the very beginning of the document and hit return or enter to create a new paragraph before any of the text. Now, make sure the text entry point is in the new paragraph you just created, then find the "Title" style within the stylist and double-click it to set the new paragraph as a Title style. You may have to tell the stylist to list "All Styles" or "Chapter Styles" in order to find the Title style.
The Constitution after adding the Title
Now click on Insert -> Fields -> Title to insert the Title metadata that we entered earlier, then press return. What you will notice is that the next paragraph is created with a "Subtitle" style (I will cover why this happens later), for now insert the "Authors" metadata that you created earlier. This will be a little different than adding the Title data, here you have to select Insert -> Fields -> Other.. (or use the Control+F2 keyboard shortcut).
Locating the Custom Authors field to Insert
The dialog that appears will allow you to insert any type of "metadata" available into your document. The custom fields will be located within the "DocInformation" tab, located under the Info selections. Go ahead and enter the custom "Authors" field.
Cleaning up the text
Before we start defining all the Articles, Sections and Amendments of the Constitution to use a Headings style, we need to clean up the text a little. You may have noticed that there are blank paragraphs seperating each paragraph that has text. When you use styles for the page formatting, it is considered bad practice to include any extra paragraphs or characters for any formatting purposes.
To remove the extra blank paragraphs were are going to be using the "Find & Replace" tool to select all of the blank paragraphs to be deleted. First, go ahead and open the tool by selecting Edit -> Find & Replace, otherwise you can also use the CTL-F keyboard shortcut to open the tool.
Searching for Empty Paragraphs
Once it is open, we are going to search for what is called a "Regular Expression" since you cannot simply search for blank paragraphs. So, you will have to click on the "More Options" button, then select the "Regular expressions" checkbox. Now we can insert into our search for box ^$ (which is the regular expression search for a paragraph that doesn't have any characters). Once that is entered simply hit the Find All button to select all of the blank paragraphs. If you did this correctly simply hit the "delete" button on the keyboard to delete all of the selected blank paragraphs (you can also use the Edit -> Cut or CTL-X command to also get rid of the selected paragraphs).
The Constitution with no Blank Paragraphs
If you work with documents that include a tab or spaces starting each paragraph you can quickly remove the extra space(s) by searching for the regular expression ^([:space:]|\t)*
Applying Styles to the Articles and Sections
Now that the text body is basically cleaned up, we will want to add a few headings to the document. Please note that we are adding these headings to convey how to use Writer, they are not a part of the original United States Constitution. So, now that's out of the way, lets add a few "Heading 1" styles before the "Preamble" aptly named "Preamble" and before the Articles start named "Articles of the Constitution".
Adding the Preamble and Articles Headings
You do this the same way as we added the Title and Subtitle, just insert a new paragraph before where you want to insert it, make sure the insertion point is in the new paragraph, then select "Heading 1" from either the dropdown apply style tool or the stylist.
Now we are going to apply the "Heading 2" style to all of the Articles. To do this we need an easy way to select just the articles that are part of a "heading". Fortunately there is an easy way to do this using Regular Expressions, so go ahead and open the "Find & Replace.." tool (CTL-F) and search for "Article [IV]" (without the quotes, also be sure that the "Regular Expression" checkbox is enabled). What this will do is select any text that is "Article I" or "Article V", since there are only 7 articles written in Roman Numerals, this will select all of them. Once they are selected, apply the "Heading 2" style using either the stylist or the dropdown apply style tool.
Assigning Heading 2 to all the Articles
Once that is done, you will want to do the same for the Sections of the Articles, but you will want to apply "Heading 3" for these. To do this simply search for "Section [1-9]" using regular expressions (without the quotes) to select them all, then apply the "Heading 3" style.
The Navigator and styling the Amendments
OpenOffice.org Writer provides a tool, the Navigator, to help you navigate larger documents. To use it, simply open it by clicking on the Navigator button on the toolbar, by selecting Edit -> Navigator, or by simply pressing F5. The navigator is similar to the stylist in that it can be moved around and docked within the Application. Go ahead and open it, move it around and try to dock it above the stylist.
Open the Navigator using the toolbar & Navigator Docked above the Stylist
Now that the navigator is open, use it to quickly move past Article VII and to the beginning of the Amendments. What you will want to do is add a Header to the Amendments named "Amendments to the Constitution", and styled with the "Heading 1" style.
Adding Amendments Heading
To apply a style to the amendments, use the "Find & Replace.." tool with the Regular Expression "Amendment [IVX]" (without the quotes) to find and select all of the Amendments. Once they are selected, apply the "Heading 2" style to them.
Setting Amendments to Heading 2
Applying Number Styles to Amendments
One final paragraph formatting issue we need to look into before we go on is the fact that Amendments 13-26 (with a few exceptions) utilize a numbered list. We will want to both format these as "Numbering 1" style and actually make these into a numbered list.
The first thing to do is style these as a "Numbering 1" style. To do this we will simply do a search for the Regular Expression "^[1-9]" (without the quotes), then apply the "Numbering 1" style which can be found in the "List Styles" or "All Styles" category.
Adding "Numbering 1" Styles to Certain Amendments
That was the easy part, now we want to define all of them as numbered lists. We will do this by Amendment, so go to Amendment 13 by scrolling to it or simply use the Navigator do quickly get there. Now what you will want to do is remove the numbering from each paragraph since OpenOffice.org Writer will automatically add the numbers to Numbered Lists. Now you will want to select all the paragraphs of the Amendment that had numbers to begin with, then simply click the "Numbering On/Off" button on the toolbar.
Adding Number Lists for Certain Amendments
NOTE: When selecting the paragraphs to specify the Numbered Lists, you only need to select part of the paragraph in order for the entire paragraph to be considered in the List. When selecting the paragraphs, you may find it frustrating when dragging between pages as the selection may seem to jump around, this involves a preference within OpenOffice.org. For now, if you find it annoying, simply put the Insertion cursor in the first paragraph you are selecting move down to the last paragraph and hold the shift button while clicking on the last paragraph to select all the paragraphs in-between.
If you simply want to skip adjusting the Numbered Lists to the remaining Amendments, go ahead, this was added just to familiarize you to Numbered Lists and how the "Numbering" styles do not automatically add the numbers to the list and will not have any affect on the rest of this tutorial.
