Add "Style" tag to Doc Composer

Feature Suggestions
1

Rather than having a “style” attribute in selected tags, I would like to see a “Style” tag, independent of them, with some additional features.

The reason I’m asking for this is that I’ve run into a problem with the “Image” tag when generating a Word document: the image and the paragraph break I put after it use the “Normal” style, but for my document I have a custom style I would like to apply to image-based paragraphs. Also, when mixing “Text” and “Property” tags, it can be tedious to repeat the style when composing a template. What I’d like to see is something like this:

<Style name="My Custom Style" alignment="center" bold="true">
  <Text>The diagram name is: </Text>
  <Property property="name"/>
  <ParagraphBreak/>
  <Image/>
  <ParagraphBreak/>
</Style>
2

Hi KDean,

Sounds like a way to improve the reusability of Styles’ definition. I have shared your suggestion with our development team. If we decide to support it, I will let you know.

Best regards,
Jick Yeung

3

Hi KDean,

I am glad to inform you that Visual Paradigm 17.0 is out. It supports defining style element like this:

<ParagraphStyle name="Title">
	<Property property="name"/>
	<ParagraphBreak/>
	<Image/>
	<ParagraphBreak/>
</ParagraphStyle>

With this code, ‘Title’ style will be applied to the value of the name and the image.

Best regards,
Jick Yeung

4

Wonderful! I’ll update my custom templates and let you now how it goes!

5

Alright… good start, but not enough, and not working properly anyway.

The Text and Property elements support the following attributes:

  • style
  • isBold
  • isItalic
  • isUnderline
  • fontFamily
  • fontSize
  • foreColor
  • alignment
  • numberingLevel
  • margin
  • margin-top
  • margin-right
  • margin-bottom
  • margin-left
  • keepWithNext

It should be possible to use all of these in the ParagraphStyle element. I just tried name+isBold, but isBold isn’t supported. I should be able to use ParagraphStyle without a name if I’m using the others to set the output style.

As for the “not working” part, here’s my custom image template:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<AnyBaseInitiationBlock>
	<ParagraphStyle name="GS1_Body">
		<Image alignment="center" maxWidth="28000"/>
		<ParagraphBreak/>
		
		<HasValueChecker property="description">
			<Text>Description: </Text><Property property="description"/>
			<ParagraphBreak/>
		</HasValueChecker>
	</ParagraphStyle>
</AnyBaseInitiationBlock>

The image comes out with the GS1_Body style and is centred, but the text comes out with the Normal style.

6

Nope. Totally broken. Some of my image/description combinations come out with the right GS1_Body style, some come out with the Normal style. I’ve tried the following with totally inconsistent results:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<AnyBaseInitiationBlock>
	<ParagraphStyle name="GS1_Body">
		<Image alignment="center" maxWidth="28000"/>
		<ParagraphBreak/>
	</ParagraphStyle>
		
	<ParagraphStyle name="GS1_Body">
		<HasValueChecker property="description">
			<Property property="description"/>
			<ParagraphBreak/>
		</HasValueChecker>
	</ParagraphStyle>
</AnyBaseInitiationBlock>

and

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<AnyBaseInitiationBlock>
	<ParagraphStyle name="GS1_Body">
		<Image alignment="center" maxWidth="28000"/>
		<ParagraphBreak/>
	</ParagraphStyle>
		
	<HasValueChecker property="description">
		<Text style="GS1_Body">Description: </Text><Property property="description" style="GS1_Body"/>
		<ParagraphBreak/>
	</HasValueChecker>
</AnyBaseInitiationBlock>

The ParagraphStyle element is unusable right now.

7

Im facing similar problems here. At the moment all my header formating is gone and neither “relative” identification of an header element via @header+ nor the absolute naming of an header does work in my word doc template