"Invisible" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote in message 
news:472f3294$1@news.povray.org...
> Brian Elliott wrote:
>
>> Whinge, whinge, whinge.  :-P  :-)
>> They do do it.  You just haven't figured it out.
>
> So, I figured out LaTeX and HTML (not to mention POV-Ray, the Lambda 
> calculus, cryptography, inorganic chemistry, and much else besides) yet I 
> couldn't figure out M$ Word?
>
> What does this say about M$ Word? ;-)

Don't get too smug Andrew, it has a corollary:  What does it say about you? 
;-)

> (Come to think about it, one critical difference between Word and those 
> other things is the lack of a *manual*. POV-Ray comes with an excellent 
> manual, but Word only offers context help. Not very useful if you have no 
> idea how a broad feature is supposed to work!)

I don't particularly like it either.  Although there is a table-of-contents 
help, not only context.  But Word seems to on-demand download this help from 
Microsoft's Internet sites somewhere as you explore the topics.  There are 
benefits that I can think to doing it that way in terms of documentation 
quality and updates, but it creeps me out.  I won't even cite "saving 
storage space" as a valid excuse for doing it that way instead of shipping 
with the app.

>>> (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...)
>>
>> I'd feel sad for you, but I prefer sans-serif.  Particularly for the 
>> types of documentation we do most of at work (standards, policy, process, 
>> work instruction, system description).  Easier to read and clearer pages 
>> than all the serif clutter, which I think is more appropriate to books 
>> and promotional material.
>
> I just think sans serif text looks primitive and unsophisticated and 
> generally childish. (Arial is almost as ugly as my own hand writing - and 
> that's saying something!)

Then we disagree on taste.  I like cleanliness and dislike clutter.  Whether 
or not serifs are attached isn't about "primitivity", it's about function.

There are purposes and situations to use serifed fonts, and situations for 
sans-serif.  Situations for old-style fonts and also for modern.  There are 
proper typographical definitions for these BTW and typography books describe 
which font styles are most appropriate to use in which document types. 
Writing a novel in a sans-serif font is bad for readability in massed text, 
but so is using a serifed font of the wrong weight, style or embellishment. 
A procedure document printed with a serifed font on a typical office A4 
printer can be eyecrossing.  It's about how whitespace is balanced in the 
font and the space around.  Race cars and sedans are both cars, but neither 
are suited to the other's function and you wouldn't use them that way.

> Plus I dislike having 3 distinct characters with identical glyphs. 
> [Lower-L, upper-I and 1.]

The 1 (one) is not affected -- it has a hook, but I agree the other two are 
definitely an issue.


... and I notice that while your reply shifts off-subject to complain about 
trivial points about fonts you hate and M$ you hate, you bypassed any notice 
of the important thing that this was all about:  That help to get you out of 
your predicament was given to you at all.  I even made a document for you to 
demonstrate the principle.  Even a "Thanks, I appreciate the effort and 
examples, but it didn't solve my issue" would be more socially apt.

At times like this, I think you deep down hate it when people help you to 
solve your problems, because your original motivation was only to be heard 
complaining.  Solving things takes away your justification to keep in a 
publicly bad mood.

-- 
Brian

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