Fa3ien wrote:

> 
>> And yet, no known word processor works like this. I find this deeply 
>> frustrating.
> 
> 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).

So... how would you, for example, apply a style that only applies to a 
single word rather than a whole paragraph?

>> Both Word and OpenOffice provide "styles", but good luck figuring out 
>> how to work them.
> 
> While Word is often of unpredictable nature, I actually manage to use 
> MSWord's Heading styles with custom appearance, without much hitches.

The main problem with M$ Word is that it tries to "guess" what you want 
to do so it can automatically do it for you. M$ seems to think that this 
is "cleaver" and makes their software look cool. However, any number of 
HCI studies will show you that non-deterministic software is 
instrinsically harder to learn...

>> 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 ?

Once I discovered the secret hidden control panel where you can actually 
change this stuff, I managed to get Word to do what I want. (Although 
it's still very confusing trying to work out where all the settings 
here. E.g., why does it add a 12 pt kern there? I didn't ask for that?!)

The trouble with OO is that out of the box, there are several hundred 
styles defined. Most of which aren't appropriate to me, and which don't 
match my tastes anyway. I did sit down and start reconfiguring them all 
to the correct font one at a time, but it was taking forever. And the 
next document I started, it all went back to horrid Arial again anyway!

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