On Thu, May 29, 2003 at 12:01:27PM +0300, Herouth Maoz wrote: > > It's more than that. Most people, unlike programmers, don't think in a > symbolic+logic way. Most don't try to find the most efficient way to perform a > task, but just *some* way to perform it, preferably a familiar one. Our training > has made us think in a different way than the majority of people. > > Thus, when writing a document, people don't think in the terms of a "level 3 > heading", but rather in a more intuitive way of "now I want a smaller header so > that people see it's not a new section but part of the old". If you told them > their document was hierarchical they would ask you why you are cursing them. To > them it's just big header - text - smaller header - text - another big header - > text. > > And styles - the idea of grouping together a bunch of characteristics and giving > them a name so you can use them later is trivial to you and me, because we've > been spending years (nearly 20 years in my case) doing that in programs. To the > average mother, it has no meaning and certainly is counter intuitive and > requires forethought. To her, the ugly tool in MSWord that "gets the style from > one place and puts it in another place" is the miracle tool, because it > represents exactly what she wants. The fact is that this is a bad practice, > because it doesn't maintain the connection between the two places for later on, > so she'll have to repeat that again and again every time that she changes the > style of the first paragraph. Go tell that to her. >
Well, MS-Word's GUI designers seem to have considered styles an advanced feature. It is buried deeply in the menus. Only the advanced users ever find out about it. However, OpenOffice puts an annoying floating "Styles" window on the screen by default. It seems its authors try harder to expose this feature. It would be interesting to let people "play" with OpenOffice and see if they figure out what this "style manager" is about. > > On another issue that was mentioned in this thread: So what if LaTeX formats > things like a book should look? Not everybody writes books, and even books > differ - a novel doesn't have the same format as a technical book. A book is > different than an article, a news article is different than an academic article, > and all of them are different than a fax or a recipe or an exam form or a text > page a teacher gives to the pupils. Those four last things are what my mother > uses her Word for - and they certainly shouldn't be arranged like a book. Oh, please, let's not start speculating here. LaTeX wont be used for those, so save your "book-is-composed-of-articles" for something else. BTW: something of LaTeX vs. MS-Word: LaTeX has a standard "styles" library. Users of word generally don't rely on the availability of a certain template in other MS-Word installations besides very standard ones. -- Tzafrir Cohen +---------------------------+ http://www.technion.ac.il/~tzafrir/ |vim is a mutt's best friend| mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] +---------------------------+ ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
