Rod Engelsman wrote:
Andy Pepperdine wrote:
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.
This was very well stated. I admit, I never could have put it this way.
There are many of us that have to take data from many sources, some
text, some WP, some Word and who know what else. Lets not forget
various OS's as well. Mesh this all together and then format it.
This is where RC is very useful. This is my major work. Import
multiple documents and make one single one out of them.
Then there is the situation where random information is written to a
document for future editing. In this case, styles are great. I have
used the ones that have come with OOo happily.
I would like OOo to offer the best in both worlds.
--
Robin Laing
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