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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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