Suppose you create a textbox, type in some text into it, exist it's "edit" state, and select it. You now cannot access Format | Paragraph..., nor Format | Character... - they are grayed out. I believe this should change. Now, you say: "Just double-click the textbox, and these will become available" - but that solution, if at all, can only apply when you have a _single_ textbox. What if I have a 100? or a 1000? That is not an inconceivable number: Just think of an imported PDF, in which every text run has its own text box. Or just a drawing with many small shapes with letters or a word each. Naturally, the effect of doing so would be the same as what happens when you have multiple selected paragraphs (possibly disjoint) for which you're changing the PS or CS.
Speaking as a technical layman, if you select an object you don't know the content. Might be text but could be anything else too. Meaning you cannot apply text formatting neither to a single textbox or frame nor to multi-selection. And I believe the way to go is to make drawing styles available in Writer and Calc.
Note that DF commands are *not* grayed out in Impress/Draw in this case, and actually work.
(In reply to Heiko Tietze from comment #1) > Speaking as a technical layman, if you select an object you don't know the > content. I'm not sure what exactly you mean. Why do I need to "know the content" to set its style? > Might be text but could be anything else too. > Meaning you cannot > apply text formatting neither to a single textbox or frame nor to > multi-selection. We're talking about objects which all have text areas. If you were to make this argument about the case of objects which cannot have any text, that's a different story - although even then, I should be able to do some DF'ing, and have it apply to whichever selected objects it can apply to. > And I believe the way to go is to make drawing styles available in Writer > and Calc. That is not an alternative to allowing direct formatting, although that's important to do as well.
We can not only change the font attributes in Draw/Impress but also the area attributes of multiple selected objects in Writer. So users can expect text formatting too.