[ale] Is there a system to encourage using styles?

[Tom Freeman]

I'm thinking that I should mark this [OT], but...

I took another adjunct gig, and am currently reviewing a colleage's (sp?) 
notes on the course. I _think_ these notes were created MS Word for Mac 
(not certain), but whatever the origin, the change over to LibreOffice for 
me has been causing some uglyness. Little things like adding a footer can 
throw the formatting of the document for a loop, since the formatting is 
based largely on tabs and new paragraph, with the odd table or table 
inserted place in a frame for variety.

I know many instruction books and courses suggest using styles rather than 
various control characters, but nobody _uses_ styles on a deliberate 
daily basis. I know I first ran into "styles" in a usable way about Word 
Perfect 4.2 or 5.0 (don't remember), but that has been a quarter century 
or so! I appears that most people continue to use the word processor in 
the same way their grandparents used a manual typewriter!!

In a dark thought, it occures to me that a dominant software provider is 
_not_ pressing styles for the simple reason that it isn't their fault then 
that documents are not cross platform, and thus organizations must stick 
to the dominant provider. </paranoia>

My question is: "Is there a word processor in the wild that encourages or 
requires the concious use of styles and templates for the creation of 
documents?"

A subquestion would be can LibreOffice/OpenOffice be reskinned to provide 
much the same effect?

I thank people for the use of their bandwidth, and appreciate their time.