(Sorry for the delay in my reply)

Monday, March 20, 2006 Robin Laing wrote:

> I have been informed by my better half that if there is ever a WP for
> Linux again, we will be getting it.  She writes for hours every day
> and even though styles are useful, they don't give her the control she
> needs or wants.  FWIW, she uses OOo and Nero for most of her work.

> As I said before, it would be nice to have the best of both worlds in
> OOo.  Isn't this the idea of being different than MS Office?

> I think you pointed my mind to what I don't like about styles.  There
> are to many ways to set the style.  Five different headings in Styles
> and Formatting and then how many under each of the headings.  I count
> 175 different styles in my install with no custom styles created.
> What do they all do?  Many don't have any descriptions to what they
> are supposed to do.  I have to find the time to play with each one.

I'm not sure I follow your point here. What does the number
of predefined styles have to do with the discussion? If you
don't need them, don't use them. At least to me, it seems
that most of them have rather meaningful names. Sure, I'm
not going to use all of them in all of my documents, but so
what?

There aren't "many ways to set the style". There are many
styles that can be applied. The important thing to
understand about styles is that they are about *logical*,
*structural* markup, not about "visuals". The visual part
/is/ important because when reading a document, the visuals
are supposed to convey a structural meaning too, but it's
important that visuals be associated with *logica*
*structure*.

There are many styles to be set because documents with
complex structures need each part to be marked separately
(and thus need a style).

> I guess it comes down to ease of control.

That's exactly what styles are about.

> Thinking about this, is there a Styles for WordPefect users anywhere?

I don't understand this question. Styles are about document
markup. Why would a WordPerfect user want a different style?

> Something to explain how to change the mindset and teach someone
> that loves reveal codes as to how to use Styles?

I love Reveal Codes and I use Styles. In WordPerfect, in OOo
Writer, in LaTeX and everywhere else. I first learned about
Styles in WordPerfect on the manual for WordPerfect 5.1 for
DOS. I'm sure you can find pretty much the same, if not
better, information in manuals about modern WordPerfect (I
think there is a WordPerfect "Bible" from Laura Acklen (not
sure about the spelling though)).

Anyway, the most important thing you need to learn about
Styles, and this is valid across all word processing
software is that Styles are used to mark up *logical*
*structural* components of the document. Their visual layout
can then be set *consistently* across the whole document.


-- 
Giuseppe "Oblomov" Bilotta


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