Re: [libreoffice-users] Book-writing with Writer

On 12/07/2013 at 16:09, Wolfgang Keller <feliphil@gmx.net> wrote:

> Wordperfect (or e.g. Framemaker) styles allow to do "structure markup".
>
> Word, OO and LO "styles" don't.
>
> In essence, this boils down to the fact that all sane document
> processing applications (whether Wordperfect, Framemaker or dozens
> of others, LaTeX or anything that outputs structured XML) use nestable
> open- and close-"tags", while Word and LO/OO don't.

Just because LO/OOo/MSO does not show tags, does not mean that they do not 
allow "structural markup".

In LaTeX, you are free to make the same spaghetti garbage as in any other text 
processing software. No one prevents you from creating you heading like this:

#v+
\vspace{2 cc}
{\LARGE \textbf{1.\hspace{1.5 cc}This is my heading}}
\vspace{1 cc}
#v-

It's equivalent to putting empty paragraphs before and after heading and 
manually formatting it (making text larger and bolder).

LaTeX \section{This is my heading} is equivalent to LO's applying one of 
Heading X styles.

> The style concept of both Word and LO/OO however is so severely screwed
> up that I've never ever seen a document that would have allowed to
> re-use content in any other way (within the same application!) than by
> copying and pasting it as unformatted text and then re-applying all
> the formatting by hand.

This only means that people who you've had working with can not use their 
tools properly. If they had used styles, you could reuse content of one 
document within another with ease.

OK, I can agree that this is somewhat tools fault (they could make more 
advanced features more discoverable and easier to understand); but I can not 
agree that only tools are to blame.

> And of course, the "reveal codes" view of Wordperfect at least allowed
> to debug documents, while there is absolutely no way to do this with
> Word or LO/OO documents

MS Word's Style Inspector is pretty useful, but rather hidden feature designed 
for exactly this task.
Unfortunately, LO does not have any equivalent.
-- 
Best regards
Mirosław Zalewski

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