Word style for inline text profile elements

[Patrick Dubois]

Could you please add the option to specify a different Word style for each element of a profile for inline text, just like you did for tables?
Thanks!

[eadocX Support]

You can already set the Word Paragraph styles for normal text, un-numbered and numbered-bullets, and headings: which other styles would you like ?

[Patrick Dubois]

Well in my case I need to be able to specify a style for requirements elements and another one for the notes field of a diagram. The reason is that I need better control of the paragraph spacing. In lots of requirement statements, I have a list of elements for which I don’t want any space between each line. For the rest of the document, the “Normal” Word style which adds a space between each paragraph is fine.

Now if the bullet style feature worked that would probably solve my problem but unfortunately it does not in my case. The probable reason is that the requirements are actually imported in EA with the DOORS extension and DOORS bullets don’t seem to be recognized as bullets by eaDocX.

Now I could try different ways of generating bullets in DOORS to see if one of them is going to be recognized properly by eaDocx but my initial feature suggestion would be simpler and would surely meet my need.

[eadocX Support]

eaDocX can already use different Word paragraph styles for the Notes field of diagrams: it’s specified in the ‘Diagrams’ part of eaDocX Options and Settings.
I sympathize with your issue with DOORS: EA seems allow all kinds of strange formatting to be imported into Notes fields, and whilst eaDocX tries to make sense of what it finds, sometimes it’s just too strange….
We’re just completing work on v3.4 which, with the new ‘scripting’ feature, should give you much more control over the details of formatting, where you have requirements like this which fall outside of ‘regular’ eaDocX function.

[Patrick Dubois]

Ok, thanks, I’ll take a look at the scripting feature when it comes out. I’m a little apprehensive however because I believe that not requiring any scripting is one of the strong advantage of eaDocX compared to competing solutions.

Regarding the notes field of diagrams, unfortunately being able to specify a different style is not helpful in my case because the Normal style is already fine. I need to specify a different style for requirement elements. But thanks for pointing it out.

My understanding of your stance is that being able to specify a custom style when using table formatting is useful but when using inline formatting it’s not (or at least not useful enough to justify a feature). I believe both have their use cases and I’m hoping that I can convince you to enable that feature in the future. It would make a great product even better. In my case it would be the little difference that makes my document really polished.

[eadocX Support]

Ah – I think I see where you’re going with this….
We currently let you specify a Word TABLE style for each Type/Stereotype combination. Are you asking for the same facility for INLINE formatting?
To keep it symmetric, we’d let you choose a Word Paragraph style for any type/stereotype, on the ‘Inline formatting’ screen.
If we did this, the new style would be used to format the Attribute name and Attribute value, and would be the same style for ALL attributes of that element type/stereotype.
Is this what you want ?

[Patrick Dubois]

Yep, that’s exactly what I’d want. Sorry for not being more clear the first time and creating misunderstanding.

The fact that it would be the same style for every attribute would probably be fine. Being able to specify a different style for every attribute would perhaps also be helpful in some cases if it’s not too hard to implement.

[eadocX Support]

What about the ‘inline’ bits which are bullets or numbered lists, which get printed as part of the ‘notes / description’ of an element? Would they need to be in a different style as well ? This would mean 3 x styles to specify for each combination. Or we could just use a single style for all 3 ?

[Patrick Dubois]

Uhm, I hadn’t thought about lists, good point. It’s probably overkill to specify a different style for lists according to which element the list stems from. The current behavior of one style per list type (bullet or numbered) for the whole document is probably sufficient.

Btw thanks for being so open about discussing features suggestions, it’s much appreciated.

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