Re: Towards a WYSIWYG word processing (was: What improvements would be truly useful?)

[Yuri Khan <yuri.v.khan@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Mar 8, 2018 at 8:36 PM, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:

> We have very different experiences with styles and templates, it
> seems.  I hate them and rarely if ever use them in the documents I
> need to write on my daytime job (and I write quite a few of them).
> IME, styles in Office like applications get in the way too much, in
> that you change something at some place, and suddenly many unrelated
> places change as well.

That is a consequence of two possible reasons:

* Office-like applications do not make you very aware of styles. To
see what style is applied, you have to position the point and look at
the style selection box. That is in contrast with markup-based editing
workflows, where you have opening and closing tags in your face all
the time.

* Your lexicon of styles is poorly designed, that you use one style
where you need two or more.

> So I prefer applying styles by hand, locally wherever I need that.  It
> works wonders on my productivity.

How big are your documents, how long-lived are they, and are they part
of a bigger collection that needs to be consistently formatted?

I might forgo styles in case of a self-sufficient document under two
pages that I need to print out once and not even bother to save to a
file.

Otherwise I’d have the opposite problem of having to do the same
change in too many places and never being sure I got them all.