"Invisible" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote in message 
news:472f1bf9$1@news.povray.org...

> (As far as I can tell, nobody else here knows how to work styles either.

See my other posts.

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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? ;-)

(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!)

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

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Nicolas Alvarez wrote:

>> Both Word and OpenOffice provide "styles", but good luck figuring out 
>> how to work them.
> 
> I find it interesting that nobody on earth ever uses them. Come on, I 
> just decided all those headings on the 30-page document shouldn't be 
> centered. Go change them. Would take seconds using styles.

Well, most people use Word to write 1-page documents. (Things like 
letters and printed notes, address labels, etc.) As for the rest, I 
guess it's just because it's so hard to figure out how this stuff 
actually works... [Assuming you even realise there's a useful thing to 
be learned about in the first place.]

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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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> 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? ;-)

I definitely prefer writing in HTML than using any word processor (just 
like I prefer SDL than a graphical modeller). I should learn DocBook.

> (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!)

M$ Office is supposed to be intuitive, so people figure out how to use 
it without reading the manual. Stupid idea in my opinion. People 
intuitively find the Center and Bold buttons, and that's how the Styles 
feature goes unnoticed. And then those same users trying to use POV-Ray 
won't read the manual (because they aren't used to reading manuals) and 
won't get too far :D

I read Microsoft did a poll asking users what features they would like 
for the next version. A *very* large amount of people asked features 
that already exist. Microsoft figured the features were hard to find, 
and that's how we get the new UI on Office 2007. Even if it's easier for 
new users (which I doubt), everyone who already knew how to use Office 
2003 now has to re-learn everything.

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Nicolas Alvarez wrote:

>> 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? ;-)
> 
> I definitely prefer writing in HTML than using any word processor (just 
> like I prefer SDL than a graphical modeller). I should learn DocBook.

I prefer writing in LaTeX, mainly due to the quality of the final 
output. On the downside, you really can't configure it very much. Here 
HTML is the way to go; lots of scope with CSS! But then, no maths...

I *could* prefer an editor like Word or OpenOffice, if only it would let 
me do structural markup rather than presentational...

> M$ Office is supposed to be intuitive, so people figure out how to use 
> it without reading the manual. Stupid idea in my opinion.

I agree.

Context help is all very nice and all, but for gaining a broad overview 
of how a feature is meant to work, nothing beats a logically structured 
manual.

> People 
> intuitively find the Center and Bold buttons, and that's how the Styles 
> feature goes unnoticed.

Arguably that's a issue of poor UI design choices. ;-) (I.e., the 
formatting buttons are big and bold in the middle of the display, and 
the styles are a tiny little thing in the corner that isn't even wide 
enough to display the whole text.)

> And then those same users trying to use POV-Ray 
> won't read the manual (because they aren't used to reading manuals) and 
> won't get too far :D

Well, no.

How many people ask where the wireframe view and the mesh editor is? ;-)

> I read Microsoft did a poll asking users what features they would like 
> for the next version. A *very* large amount of people asked features 
> that already exist. Microsoft figured the features were hard to find, 
> and that's how we get the new UI on Office 2007. Even if it's easier for 
> new users (which I doubt), everyone who already knew how to use Office 
> 2003 now has to re-learn everything.

Haha - M$ can then claim all these are "new" features, and everybody will go

   OMFG!!1!!eleven... micsoft is teh 0wnerz!

and think M$ are a really great company for producing all these cool new 
features. *sigh*

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> 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?

In fairness, changing the styles in LaTeX is not something trivial 
either. As far as I figure, anytime you want to modify the appearance of 
something, you are going to have to dig into TeX code, which is not 
really friendly. That's the spirit of LaTeX, to split the formatting 
from the structure as much as possible.

I like LaTeX allright, but I admit it is utterly broken in some respects 
(images and fonts come to mind), and I dream that someday someone will 
come up with an alternative that fixes some of these... Once in a while, 
departing from the backward-compatible frozen software could be a good 
thing.

I mean I hope we will not be stuck forever between LaTeX where you 
cannot do anything visually, and Word-alike where you must do everything 
visually...

-- 
Vincent

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Vincent Le Chevalier wrote:

> In fairness, changing the styles in LaTeX is not something trivial 
> either.

Lamentably true...

> I like LaTeX allright, but I admit it is utterly broken in some respects 
> (images and fonts come to mind), and I dream that someday someone will 
> come up with an alternative that fixes some of these... Once in a while, 
> departing from the backward-compatible frozen software could be a good 
> thing.
> 
> I mean I hope we will not be stuck forever between LaTeX where you 
> cannot do anything visually, and Word-alike where you must do everything 
> visually...

Amen!

(Now and then, I do have these insane ideas that maybe I could 
reimplement TeX using Haskell. I mean, the source code is available, so...)

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"Gilles Tran" <gil### [at] agroparistechfr> wrote:
> Because you're a wimp. Go build some muscles. Have you looked at all those
> secretaries? Seen their huge, bulging forearms and their sausage-thick
> fingers ? That's the key. You need to try *** very hard *** to change styles
> in Word.
>
> You can also use a sledgehammer but you'll be breaking the EULA, and
> Microsoft lawyers will have Northampton nuked into a glowing glass sheet
> before you can spell Arial.

LOL! :))

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> Here HTML is the way to go; lots of scope with CSS! But then, no maths...

Well, you can mix MathML inside XHTML; but I can't tell you about 
browser support :)

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