From: Tomas Frydrych (tomas@frydrych.uklinux.net)
Date: Thu May 29 2003 - 10:18:02 EDT
Hi Dom,
> That said, templates can contain a lot more than just
> style information. While I can see some cases where it
> would be useful to link documents with templates, it's
> not clear to me that in the majority of cased you'd
> want old documents to have their styles/content/other
> changed when their base template changed, or when
> documents were transferred across computers. It's not
> clear that you want your document to look differently
> on another's machine just because their definition of
> 'Normal' differs from yours. I much prefer the current
> situation to the proposed one.
In Word it works like this (and I really like it): you create a new 
doc based on a template. At that stage all styles from the template 
get copied into the new document. When you edit the styles, you do so 
on those stored in the document (although you have option to export 
the changes back to the template, this too is handy). If you save the 
doc and reload it, by default you reload styles from the doc, not the 
template. However, there is an option you can set that the styles 
should be reloaded from the template every time you open the doc. 
This is priceless if you work on a project that consists of a number 
of docs that use the same template and need to have a consistent 
look;  you just maintain the styles in the template.
Such an automated process would not be hard to implement, even just a 
manual command on the Format menu allowing to reload styles from 
manually selected document would be very handy.
Tomas
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