David Clark wrote:
The advantages of Reveal Codes v. No Reveal Codes are that you can SEE formatting problems. Right before your very eyes.
I used WP 5.2 in the Navy. RC indeed was a wonderful feature. In particular it was very useful for documents that had been edited repeatedly, often by different people.
Reveal codes is not a reason to reject OO, of course, but it looks like it's just not there.
It's not there for a very good reason. WP and OOo have very different document models. The way I understand it is that WP treats a document as a long stream of text and the formatting codes are sort of like on/off switches. So in WP you can have something like <Bold on> some text <Italic on> some more text <Bold off> yet more text <Italic off>, resulting in text that's Bold, then Bold and Italic, then Italic, and then normal. The problem that could arise is if you highlighted some text and applied a format, then later highlighted the same text and applied a different formatting, etc. You could get the codes arranged like <Bold on><Italic on> text <Bold off><Italic off> and it could be a real mess trying to untangle it later.
On the other hand, OOo (and Word, I believe) treat a document as a collection of objects -- characters, paragraphs, frames, etc. -- and these objects have properties that can include things like Bold and Italic. It's a whole different concept, and I believe that the object model makes more sense but YMMV. They both have their particular strengths and weaknesses.
So complaining that OOo doesn't have Reveal Codes is like complaining that your pickup truck doesn't have enough trunk space or that your microwave oven doesn't have a feature to automatically turn off the gas. OOo doesn't have a Reveal Codes feature because OOo documents don't have any codes to reveal. Even direct formatting (highlighting text and hitting the Bold button, for example) is implemented "behind the scenes" through the use of automatically created styles (they just don't show up in the Stylist window).
So far, I like the spare presentation for starting a new document -- so unlike Word's overpopulated blank page with what seem to be a zillion features spread all over the monitor including some idiot's idea of a help avatar that looks like a staple with big-bug eyes. What nonsense that is.
Quite possibly the most inane and annoying feature ever breathed into life by the mad scientists in Redmond. What were they thinking??!!
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