[scribus] Too many styles show up when I Edit | Styles & other issues with styles

[Gary Dale]

On 2022-11-04 17:27, Gary Dale wrote:
> On 2022-11-04 14:20, Gregory Pittman wrote:
>> On 11/4/22 13:48, Gary Dale wrote:
>>> I'm running Debian/Bookworm on an AMD64 system. Scribus is v1.5.8.
>>>
>>> I am having a lot of problems with styles. You can see the basic 
>>> problem in the attached image which is a screenshot of Edit | Style 
>>> window. I apparently have multiple "Default Paragraph Style"s, for 
>>> example. This survives shutting down Scribus and restarting, as well 
>>> as rebooting. Moreover I can't get rid of them without deleting the 
>>> style, which would require me to replace it with something else - 
>>> the extra copies don't show up in the "replace style with: dialogue 
>>> so I can't replace the deleted style with the real one.
>>>
>>> To see what was going on, I opened my document in Kate and searched 
>>> for the style definition line. It only appears once but in this 
>>> particular case, I also found a "Default Paragraph Style (2)" 
>>> definition that doesn't show up in the list of styles.
>>>
>>> For the "Bullet List Paragraph Style", which also appears 3 times, 
>>> there was just the single definition line. The bullet list 
>>> definition is a 3mm indent with a first line indent of -3mm. In Kate 
>>> this shows up as:
>>>
>>>          <STYLE NAME="Bullet List Paragraph Style" PARENT="Default 
>>> Paragraph Style" INDENT="8.50393700787402" FIRST="-8.50393700787402" 
>>> VOR="0"/>
>>>
>>> However some of my bullet lists show the correct indents while 
>>> others seem to ignore them. I traced this down to flowing text 
>>> around a picture frame (pushing the left margin to the right of the 
>>> picture). When this happens, Scribus (incorrectly in my opinion) 
>>> ignores the indents. I suggest that the better behaviour is for 
>>> Scribus to apply the indent rules after wrapping the text, so that 
>>> the first bit of text in a line gets the first line indent while the 
>>> subsequent lines get the default indent.
>>>
>>> Finally, when I import a page or copy a section of a different 
>>> document into a document, it pulls in all of the styles from the 
>>> source document and not just the ones used in that page/section. 
>>> This leaves me with a lot of extra styles that I have to delete. 
>>> Scribus doesn't even check to see if styles with the same name have 
>>> the same definition - it simply renames the imported style and uses it.
>>>
>>> I believe it would be better to ask the user about conflicting names 
>>> when they actually occur in in the parts being imported rather than 
>>> simply assuming that we want to other document's styles. However, 
>>> even discarding the source document's styles when they conflict 
>>> seems better than duplicating them. Maybe is just my use case, but I 
>>> think its more likely that the destination document's styles are 
>>> likely to be the same or updated versions of the styles from the 
>>> source document.
>>
>> Hi Gary,
>>
>> Somehow you've managed to create all these duplications. Your best 
>> bet is to go through them and delete the ones you don't want. Scribus 
>> expects you to be in control of the naming of styles.
>>
> I didn't create duplicates and they don't exist in the document - when 
> I open it in Kate, there is only one style element for the various 
> duplicated names. If I had created styles with duplicate names, there 
> should be multiple style elements with the same name.
>
> Indeed, looking at the document, the style names only occur exactly 
> where I would I expect them - in the style element and in each 
> paragraph element that uses that style. There must something in the 
> Scribus code that is creating the duplicates because the duplicates 
> are not in the document's .sla file.
>
> If you refer to the attachment in the original post, I just tried to 
> delete Bullet List 2 Paragraph Style, which I wasn't using (yet). 
> Deleting it removed all three occurrences in the single operation. 
> Adding it back in creates 3 new copies. However, you will note that 
> there is only one instance of List Paragraph Style, so it's not as 
> simple as the 3 "Default Paragraph Style"s propagating.
>
> I notice there are also at least 2 styles that don't show up in the 
> list but are in the document (Copy of Default Paragraph Style & 
> Default Paragraph Style (2)) - but are only defined, not used. I can't 
> delete them directly through Scribus but they do show up in the list 
> of replacement styles dialogue.
>
> Anyway, what this suggests is that the routine that loads the document 
> styles is creating duplicates for some reason. The Edit Styles 
> dialogue is omitting some styles that exist in the document and that 
> must have been loaded. Here's the style element for one of them:
>
> <STYLE NAME="Copy of Default Paragraph Style" DefaultStyle="1" 
> ALIGN="0" LINESPMode="1" LINESP="15" INDENT="0" RMARGIN="0" FIRST="0" 
> VOR="0" NACH="0" ParagraphEffectOffset="0" DROP="0" DROPLIN="2" 
> OpticalMargins="0" CPARENT="Default Character Style"/>
>
> As I said, I can see it as a replacement style but can't use it as a 
> style nor delete it.
>
Interesting. I deleted the "Copy of Default Paragraph Style" and 
"Default Paragraph Style (2)" styles using Kate to edit the .sla as a 
text file and the extra styles disappeared when I opened the document in 
Scribus.