Michele wrote:
The need for the reveal codes feature is debated on this list every 6 months or so as many people think like you and would very much like to see it implemented. OOo instead is styles based, and I can assure you that once you start using styles the misbehaving text becomes a thing of the past. Of course you will have to re-train yourself and I understand that it is not easy. I was told that there is a macro around that can mimic to a point the reveal codes feature... maybe if you google for it you may find it.
Note that Word Perfect also supports styles, as does modern HTML and XML, yet they are all obviously code based. Same with LaTeX.
Using styles is a great help, but it has nothing to do with whether a system uses codes internally or not. It is misleading to suggest that there is a choice between code-based word-processing and style-based word-processing and that styles are somehow a better substitute for codes. One can have both styles and codes. But the pure code-based applications are less efficient internally, particular when one must jump into the middle of some text and attempt to figure out what format to display based on codes which might or might not occur in previous text. One needs other means of quickly identifying what the current display should be, and once one has developed these, one discovers that one no longer needs codes.
So almost all modern word processors and desktop publishers don’t use codes internally for basic style changes, which is why codes cannot be revealed: the codes don’t exist. Bolding for example, is no longer internally turned on and off by codes (except in the source code). Rather, internally, bolding is a property which is applied to particular text ranges.
Accordingly most of the problems that occur with code-based word processors that can be solved by looking at codes don’t exist in more modern word processors. Codes can’t get disordered or misplaced because no codes exist.
Unfortunately Word Perfect users tend to be so used to looking for codes that will solve everything (which is the right thing to do in a code-based word-processor) that they have a great deal of difficulty in understanding an object-based approach to word processing. They tend to believe that there simply *must* be codes in there somewhere that no-one wants to reveal for some undiscoverable reason.
The RevealCodes macro emulates what the OpenOffice.org Writer data stream might look like if it did have codes. But there really still are no codes. It is available at http://homepages.paradise.net.nz/hillview/OOo .
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