bg wrote:
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.
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
Brewster, I'm curious as to what you currently use multiple spaces for,
that you couldn't use things like tabs for, without the requirement of
the "reveal code" functionality?
For tab stops, as an example, it's quite easy to see what they're doing
(where they are located, etc.) with no reveal code.
Also, if what you're doing would lend itself to tables instead of tabs,
same thing -- I'm not sure why this reveal code option would be needed.
But I don't have any understanding of what you're trying to do when you
use multiple spaces, so maybe you could explain that.
