OpenOffice.org BASIC Guide - OpenOffice.org wiki

The Structure of Text Documents
Formatting
There are various ways of formatting text. The easiest way is to assign the format properties directly to the text
sequence. This is called direct formatting. Direct formatting is used in particular with short documents because
the formats can be assigned by the user with the mouse. You can, for example, highlight a certain word within a
text using bold type or center a line.
In addition to direct formatting, you can also format text using templates. This is called indirect formatting. With
indirect formatting, the user assigns a pre-defined template to the relevant text portion. If the layout of the text is
changed at a later date, the user only needs to change the template. OpenOffice.org then changes the way in
which all text portions which use this template are depicted.
Note – VBA : In VBA, the formatting properties of an object are usually spread over a range of sub-objects
(for example, Range.Font, Range.Borders, Range.Shading, Range.ParagraphFormat). The properties are
accessed by means of cascading expressions (for example, Range.Font.AllCaps). In OpenOffice.org Basic, the
formatting properties on the other hand are available directly, using the relevant objects (TextCursor,
Paragraph, and so on). You will find an overview of the character and paragraph properties available in
OpenOffice.org in the following two sections.
Note – The formatting properties can be found in each object (Paragraph, TextCursor, and so on) and can
be applied directly.
Character Properties
Those format properties that refer to individual characters are described as character properties. These include
bold type and the font type. Objects that allow character properties to be set have to support the
com.sun.star.style.CharacterProperties service. OpenOffice.org recognizes a whole range of services that support
this service. These include the previously described com.sun.star.text.Paragraph services for paragraphs as well as
the com.sun.star.text.TextPortion services for paragraph portions.
The com.sun.star.style.CharacterProperties service does not provide any interfaces, but instead offers a range of
properties through which character properties can be defined and called. A complete list of all character
properties can be found in the OpenOffice.org API reference. The following list describes the most important
properties:
CharFontName (String)
name of font type selected.
CharColor (Long)
text color.
CharHeight (Float)
character height in points (pt).
CharUnderline (Constant group)
type of underscore (constants in accordance with com.sun.star.awt.FontUnderline).
CharWeight (Constant group)
font weight (constants in accordance with com.sun.star.awt.FontWeight).
CharBackColor (Long)
background color.
CharKeepTogether (Boolean)
suppression of automatic line break.
CharStyleName (String)
name of character template.
72 OpenOffice.org 3.2 BASIC Guide · March 2010