Good point about systems allowing direct formatting Virgil. It should be
prohibited. I didn't know that AbiWord had the lockdown feature ("lockdown"
being the trendy word in Oz these days!), but it is a good idea.AbiWord is still available, the latest release for Linux was in July of this year. The Windows version has been dropped though. I always thought that it was a rather slick lightweight word processor in my pre-latex days. One of the things I like about Markdown is that I can convince some of my friends to use it. They are doing family diaries and trip chronicles and such that don't require anything too fancy. The separation of writing and formatting is a revelation to them. Cheers, Alan On Fri, 8 Oct 2021 at 13:02, Virgil Arrington <cuyfa...@hotmail.com> wrote: > On 10/7/2021 9:44 PM, Alan Tyree wrote: > > Why is it so hard to get people to use styles? I worked recently with > > a friend to convert his Word document into an ePub. My advice is don't > > ever, ever do this! Even though I had advocated the use of styles, he > > had spent hours using direct formatting. > > > > And it is not just amateurs. I write for a service that insists on > > using Word documents (who knows why?) and the stuff they send me is > > all direct formatting. > > > > I know that this is preaching to the choir here, but I wondered if > > anyone had a strategy that convinced others to work with styles. > > > I used to teach a course in Law Office Technology for paralegal > students. One of the sections required that I teach them how to use > Word. I was determined to at least expose them to the benefit of styles. > So, one day, I gave them an assignment. I had emailed them a Word > document consisting of plain unformatted text. I then gave them a > printed copy of the same text that I had previously formatted to look > like a court document. I then told them that their assignment was to > make their unformatted text look like the formatted result. > > I usually would let them struggle for about a half an hour, laboriously > applying all sorts of direct formatting to their document. I would then > intervene and demonstrate before their eyes how I could format the > document in literally under a minute using the styles that were already > available on all of their computers. > > That got their attention. I later graded all of their assignments not > only on substance but on whether or not they had used styles instead of > direct formatting. > > The obvious problem with styles is that it is time consuming to create > and edit them. It is counter-intuitive to spend so much time on our > tools when all we want is to get the work done. One drawback to programs > like Word or LibreOffice is that they make direct formatting even > possible whereas LyX and LaTeX all but force a person to use styles (or > "environments"). I remember years ago another FOSS word processor -- > AbiWord -- had a feature called "lock styles" that would prevent direct > formatting. I thought it was a great idea. > > Virgil > -- Alan L Tyree http://www2.austlii.edu.au/~alan
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