/With Wordperfect, there's "Reveal Codes", which allows you to see
what's wrong and fix it//
Not trying to defend WORD, which has steadily deteriorated from being
good to being unusable, but in it you can also see the field codes and
correct them, if you know what you are doing. It is ugly, but not much
harder than Lyx/Latex.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ehud Kaplan
Wolfgang Keller wrote:
Just the same as I do on the LyX list, I brought up the fact that if you want
to, you can do styles based authoring on MS Word just as easily as on TeX or
LaTeX or LyX, and in fact I've written a complete book in WordPerfect 5.1 and
another in MS Word, using nothing but styles. And of course a debate
ensued :-)
I've been using "structure markup" as The Natural Way to work with documents
for 20 years, the first time with Wordperfect on DOS 3.3, long before I even heard of the
existence of LaTeX or SGML.
But then one guy brought up an irrefutable point which I think might be an
outstanding talking point of LyX. He said that wordprocessing documents often
get so messed up, format wise, that they can't be salvaged without saving to
text and reformatting everything. I've certainly seen such a MS Word doc -- I
think we all have.
In fact in collaborative environments (e.g. companies), where several people work together on the
same document, Word documents _always_ end up like that - A hopelessly tangled spaghetti mess. In
fact I never managed to figure out how to copy and paste content from two different versions of a
document, which are both perfectly well "styled" and which were created using the same
"template" in such a way that the resulting document isn't messed up.
Other document processors (Framemaker, Wordperfect, RagTime, Nisus, Mellel...)
show how to implement this a _lot_ better. Interestingly, OpenOffice is the
only one I know of that does as badly as MS Word.
With Wordperfect, there's "Reveal Codes", which allows you to see what's wrong
and fix it.
With SGML/XML environments, you can show the "tags" and edit them directly.
With TeX or LaTeX or LyX, almost always coding errors immediately make the doc
uncompileable, so you see it right away. The one exception is when a document
class silently reverts to the default, and I showed how to prevent that here:
http://www.troubleshooters.com/linux/lyx/surefire_layout.htm
So I think one LyX talking point to add is that with LyX, you seldom get docs
that format themselves into uselessness.
You can mess up a document with "finger-painting" in LaTeX/LyX as well,
however. And those im-/export filters that I know of do so.
Sincerely,
Wolfgang
