Re: [libreoffice-users] Re: Paragraph styles

Of course, everybody's work is different. From what you described you could 
use Notepad and get the job done.

However, as an attorney, I write legal briefs. They require a title page 
with no page numbers, front matter consisting of a table of contents, and a 
table of authorities with lower case Roman numerals, and then the main body 
of the brief with Arabic page numbers. I will have headings and subheadings, 
set in boldface or italics, which I need to keep on the same page as the 
following paragraphs, normal paragraphs that are double spaced with the 
first line indented, quoted material that will be single spaced with left 
and right indented margins, and footnotes. I want to make sure I avoid 
widows and orphans to keep the brief readable for the judge.

When I began doing this with Word for Windows, I formatted all of this 
manually, and it was a real pain. I found myself applying the same 
formatting characteristics over and over again on different parts of my 
document. After spending about a half hour setting up my styles, I can now 
write and format my documents with great speed and know that my headings 
will all be the same.

Virgil



-----Original Message----- 
From: Doug
Sent: Sunday, May 05, 2013 2:20 PM
To: Virgil Arrington ; users@global.libreoffice.org
Subject: Re: [libreoffice-users] Re: Paragraph styles

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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