If you write stuff in LaTeX, you can ask for a section heading or a 
subsection heading, and LaTeX will automatically take care of all 
formatting for you. Indeed, it will even build a table of contents if 
you want.

If you write stuff in HTML, you can also ask for various levels of 
headings. And using CSS, you can tune exactly what the result looks 
like. For example, if you suddenly decide that you want all the level 2 
headings in italics, you can change 1 line of CSS and the whole document 
is instantly updated to match.

And yet, no known word processor works like this. I find this deeply 
frustrating. I should be able to just hilight some text and say "this is 
a heading" and all the formatting should *just work*. But I have yet to 
find a word processor that can do this. And it irritates the hell out of me!

Both Word and OpenOffice provide "styles", but good luck figuring out 
how to work them. In particular, Word provides styles called "Normal", 
"Heading 1", "Heading 2", etc. But it seems to be physically impossible 
to *change* these styles. And what the hell is the point of a style that 
you can't change? Being able to instantly change all the headings in 
your document at once is the entire *point* of styles!! So why make them 
read-only?

(I've just moved from Word 97 to Word 2003. It's really quite amusing 
watching it create millions of useless style objects each time I press a 
formatting button. It would be far more amusing however if I could 
actually *use* styles to do something useful...)

As for OpenOffice Writer, here again we have styles. Except that here 
the style system is way more complex; I really can't figure it out. 
There seems to be several types of styles depending on what they apply 
to and... I'm confused. Also, once again the defaults are not to my 
liking, but there appears to be absolutely no way to change them. (Short 
of editing each one by hand, for all several million. It also appears to 
be impossible to remove unwanted styles...)

Seriously. I want to be able to create sections and subsections, and *I* 
want to choose what these look like. Is that really so hard? Why has 
nobody implemented this simple feature yet??

(In particular, I utterly *hate* sans serif fonts. Yet all these 
programs always default to it. GRR! At least Excel lets you change the 
default worksheet font; OpenOffice Calc seems to lack any such option...)

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