My current job requires writing long, highly-technical documents in Word and it is absolutely HORRID! I totally agree with you!
I've seen editors for HTML and XML where you have two windows, one that contains the raw source and one that contains a reasonably-accurate rendition of the formatted text. You can edit in either pane and the results are displayed to the other. This seems like a reasonable compromise between people who prefer the raw text format (like most of us on this list) and those who prefer the WYSIWYG approach. --- Nick Stoughton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Mon, 2007-08-20 at 14:11 -0400, Karee, Srinivas wrote: > > Basically I cannot lose bold/italic/font and other stuff. > > The issue here for me is about the "meta-information". I have a 4,000 > page document that describes programming APIs. The fact that a function > name is in italics with () after it is of much less importance to me > than the fact that I'm talking about a function here, which is something > that will appear in the index, etc etc. And when I describe a symbolic > constant, it comes out in ALL CAPS and in Courier-Roman font, but as far > as I'm concerned, I'm just describing a constant. I don't care what it > looks like until the very last moment when it gets rendered for the > reader. > > This is one of the things I hate about WYSIWYG editors ... it is all > about the rendering, and not about the content. > > Both groff and docbook-XML give me this level of abstraction when I'm > dealing with the source of a document. Word does not. > > So, my real question, I guess, is do you care only about the > bold/italic/font information, or do you care about the meaning (and > possible other side effects, such as indexing) behind the font? > -- > Nick Stoughton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > USENIX > >
