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

[Tom Freeman]

Thank you Jim.

I've got the liberation fonts so that is a largely solved problem at this 
time. It is the use/disuse of styles and other structured elements that is 
currently "bugging" me. And as you note: a huge portion of users places 
things with returns and tabs, and adds font effects/changes as specific 
font effects on specific characters. And a fair percentage of the 
individuals who do so have had one or more "computer literacy" courses 
which specifically include the use of MS Word. My guess is that we may 
agree that there is sufficient guilt to go around on this: MS for making 
styles/templates harder to find, educators (me) who don't/can't hew to 
best practices or find ways to trick students into finding deeper 
solutions, and individuals just interested in getting by ("get the job 
done").

I still wonder if Libreoffice can be skinned or adapted some way to 
largely hide access to any appearance of direct changes.

I will need to look again at Abiword. Last time I looked, I completely 
lacked the time to work on early levels of mastery to achieve the effects 
I needed. Thanks for the nudge and push...

Now to put some Hendrix on, followed by Stravinsky, and maybe Burrito 
Brothers and get some papers graded...

Thank you to one and all for the use of your bandwidth.

On Sat, 3 Oct 2015, Jim Kinney wrote:

> 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 process
>  or 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.
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