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

Jim Kinney jkinney at jimkinney.us
Sat Oct 3 15:50:10 EDT 2015


Alignment issues between word and libreoffice can be nearly eliminated by adding and using the liberation font collection. They are a glyph for glyph replacement for the MS TT font set that word defaults to on windows platforms. Word on Mac is just screwy. 

It never ceases to amaze me how most people ignore styles and manually place everything with spaces and tabs  and then will scream a fit if they don't have the exact version of word they "need". Abiword would make a better tool for them. (abiword is pretty awesome and is suitable for probably 95% of all word processing needs.)

A failure of styles is the lack of a visual example with comments to explain usage for the standard styles. 

Libreoffice uses styles by default.  And your paranoia is probably justified.

On October 3, 2015 12:55:29 PM EDT, Tom Freeman <tfreeman at intel.digichem.net> wrote:
>
>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.
>_______________________________________________
>Ale mailing list
>Ale at ale.org
>http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
>See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
>http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo

-- 
Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.ale.org/pipermail/ale/attachments/20151003/b04fb2f1/attachment.html>


More information about the Ale mailing list