> 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!

Lotus Ami Pro did that pretty well. Most consistent style-sheets system
I encountered in a word processor. Don't know if they still sell Ami's
successor, Word Pro.

BTW, don't highlight text when applying a style, just put the cursor within the
paragraph, and the style will be applied to the paragraph (that's how
it should be).

> 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?

While Word is often of unpredictable nature, I actually manage to use MSWord's
Heading styles with custom appearance, without much hitches.  The main
rule I would give in that area is : don't try to do a numbered heading
hierarchy (1.1 1.2 1.2.1 ...) with other styles than Word's standard
"Heading X" styles.

I didn't encounter much problem doing this in OO, either.

> (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...)

It needs to be heavily configured to avoid most of these annoying
on-the-fly-style-creations.  Once you are accustomed to be very
cautious about what you're doing (never touch the ruler, always
paste-as-plain-text from other texts,...), you can have a chance to
limit the number of styles in use (been there, done that).

> 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...)

In OO, styles are generally cascading from "standard".

Do you want me to prepare a base document in OO or Word, based on your
indications, so you can see how it works from an already customised
document ?

Fabien.

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