Andy Pepperdine wrote:
On Tuesday 21 March 2006 14:05, Rod Engelsman wrote:
Eric Beversluis wrote:
I'm just a simple-minded semi-geek, but this question keeps bothering me
as I see the ongoing debate re "reveal codes":
Isn't this all irrelevant, since, in order to have true "reveal codes,"
OOo would have to be completely rewritten?
You're absolutely right that RC, per se, is irrelevant to OOo, but the
discussion started with that question, based on a misconception. That
doesn't change the fact that the underlying need for a better way to see
what's going on is valid.
I agree that EB is right. It reminds me of the guy who had never seen an
electric kettle before and when given one and asked to boil some water,
filled it and put it on the gas ring.
Have I ever said anything different? The bulk of my posts has been aimed
squarely at trying to help the die-hard WP fans understand that exact point.
For the record, now I see what RC's are, I think I would not like them. Styles
encourage me to think before acting, to plan the layout of a document before
writing it.
I would say more than "encourage," practically "require" is closer to
the truth. Unfortunately, you don't always have that luxury.
Sometimes you may not have a clear idea of where you want to go or what
you want it to look like. Often you will change your mind mid-stream.
Depending on the situation, styles may be a help or a hindrance. I've
had it go both ways.
And this all assumes that you are the originator of the document. I'm as
likely as not to be working with a legacy document, probably authored in
MSWord. The normal state of affairs in such cases is that you have a doc
with a haphazard mixture of intentional styles, automatic styles, and
direct formatting.
I can define header styles, normal body text styles, indented
text for quoted English text, and indented paragraphs for a foreign language
which would show also be italic. Emphasis in the English is shown by making
the text italic, but emphasis in the foreign language is normal. What would
RCs show in the latter case? I would think in terms of emphasis; I would
expect them to say "turn on normal". Or would they actually say "turn off
italic"? How do you keep track of the actual state of things from the
beginning of the document? All those ons and offs. Whereas with a style which
I have defined, I know what the state is at any place at all, and if I want
to change it, just select the text, and apply the style. Easy. And if I
decide to change the way emphasis is shown (eg. by underlining), then I have
only to change the styles and not find all the places in the text which are
emphasised.
That's all very true; *assuming* that you have the luxury of originating
the document from a blank sheet of paper.
At some level, this is really just another one of those pointless
"religious wars." It reminds me very much of debates I've seen here
about the relative merits of bitmap vs. vector graphics.
I think that if you _are_ starting from a blank slate and have a clear
idea of what you want your document to look like, then the Writer/Word
object/style model is easier and more consistent.
On the other hand, I think if you are editing an existing document then
Wordperfect stream/token may have the upper hand. I believe it may well
be easier to fix a screwed up Wordperfect doc using RC than to fix a
screwed up Word or Writer doc.
One thing to remember, on both sides of the "debate," is that the
internal models are completely different so the ways in which docs get
messed up are totally different. For example, in Wordperfect it is
possible to accidentally delete the on or off token while leaving the
other one behind, or to have useless, remnant, on/off pairs sitting
around after a text deletion. This depends entirely on how smart the
program handles these things. Writer isn't vulnerable to these kinds of
errors; instead it has other issues that Wordperfect is immune to. It's
like operating systems and viruses.
And I'm concentrating here on fixing errors because that's what RC is
all about. As long as everything works well there is little functional
reason to prefer one over the other since it's all mostly transparent to
the end user anyway.
--
Rod
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