On 05/05/2013 01:19 PM, Virgil Arrington wrote:
Doug wrote,
I may be wrong, but it would seem to me that all this fuss about
styles is made by people who are trying to do desktop publishing.
That's fine, altho there are probably better programs to do that,
even available to Linux users. I'm not ashamed to say that I use
word processors as word processors, not as desktop publishers. I am
very happy to have this glorified typewriter--one which
can import whole paragraphs, move them, or existing ones around,
correct spelling errors without retyping, so some editing--all the
things I might have done on my typewriter, except now so much faster
and easier. Let the publisher of my document format it with
his desktop publishing app. He doesn't need a word processor, he
needs its big brother--but I don't!
Actually, Doug, it sounds like you're using word processors as "text
editors," simple programs that allow you to enter and edit text
without worrying about final output. Most people using word processors
are preparing documents to be printed, and if you're going to print a
text file, you're going to have to format it.
Styles provide a very effective way to quickly and consistently format
a document. I agree, if you don't care about formatting, don't worry
about styles. But, if you do care about formatting, and you want to do
it efficiently, consistently, and quickly, then styles let you do that.
Let's say you want to build a house. You can do it with a hand saw and
a hammer if you want, but my guess is that a professional builder
would want to take advantage of the most advanced power tools
available even if s/he might need to invest some time to learn how to
use them.
Virgil
I write letters--where I have a heading saved as a file that I can
import--and I write occasionally for publication, in which case I write
double-spaced,
extra space for paragraph, and no indent. I don't need any kind of
"style" to do that--I can set the double space once per article--that is
no more
trouble than finding and turning on a preset style, which I could only
do if I knew how to create it in the first place. And I edit material
sent for a
newsletter of some 1000 circulation, for which the publisher uses
Pagemaker on a Mac to format it. I don't know, but I think any kind of
style
setting would go bonkers seeing the formats that come in and trying to
mold them into something consistent. I mold them fairly easily in a word
processor, by hand. And I save in MS .doc 1997~2003 format, because
everybody in the world can read that. And I write emails, and all I need to
do is fix typos, which styles can't do!
I rest my case. --doug
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