> At 21:37 30/04/2009 -0700, Brewster Gillett wrote: > >Space bar is on strike. In both Calc and Writer, it will give me one > >space, and one only, then no response from the space bar to > >subsequent requests. Am I caught in some kind of Template Warp? > >Should I ask Scotty to beam me up?
Brian Barker wrote: > What could cause such a thing is that you've discovered the office > suite of the future! Multiple spaces are a typewriter artifice, of > course, and totally out of place in a word processor, where > formatting should be achieved with tabs, margins, table cells, > justification, paragraph and character spacing, and so on. Any > number of consecutive presses of the space bar should indicate a word > break and nothing more. The amount of space this creates - if any - > should depend on the context. Allowing multiple spaces is a sop to > the typewriter brigade. > > Oh, and if you really want to return to the past, just go to Tools | > AutoCorrect... | Options and remove the tick from "Ignore double spaces". > > I trust this helps. > > Brian Barker (donning his flame-proof clothing) Brewster replies: Good one! You got me pegged, as a member of the typewriter brigade. I will only observe that there is no way this typewriter brigadier will ever fully adapt to ceding control to that extent to the software until his word processor has the most useful feature of the old Word Perfect; "REVEAL CODES". I really despise flying blind, and trusting to some programmer's concept of how word processing should work. Give me "REVEAL CODES" and I will eventually adapt, yea, even unto (gasp!) the dreaded templates - because a properly implemented "REVEAL CODES" provides us with a safety net, and abolishes guesswork almost entirely. I am not especially enamored of an office of the future where I have to painstakingly create a set of option decisions to format my work, then trust entirely to the finished appearance to inform me whether my formatting decisions are functioning as intended. That works fine up until some element of it *doesn't*, and which point the lucky user gets to fish around in endless optioning submenus trying to remember which obscure one is causing his text to resemble a corn maze.... Thanks for the tip, BTW. I don't know how that option got changed, but I have a suspicion, as I have had a couple of guests use the software just recently :-) Brewster -- ********************************************************************** W. Brewster Gillett [email protected] Portland, OR USA ********************************************************************** Simply because you don't like to hear it, that doesn't make it untrue. ********************************************************************** --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
