[libreoffice-users] direct formatting and styles

At the risk of beating a horse to death, today I stumbled on an online 
rant against MS-Word.

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/10/why-microsoft-word-must-die.html

While the entire blog is worth reading, I was particularly struck by the 
following, which describes precisely my frustration with the design of 
the "one size fits all" office word processor.

"Steve Jobs approached Bill Gates to write applications for the new 
Macintosh system in 1984, and Bill agreed. One of his first jobs was to 
organize the first true WYSIWYG word processor for a personal computer 
-- Microsoft Word for Macintosh. Arguments raged internally: should it 
use control codes, or hierarchical style sheets? In the end, the decree 
went out: Word should implement /both/ formatting paradigms. Even though 
they're fundamentally incompatible and you can get into a horrible mess 
by applying simple character formatting to a style-driven document, or 
vice versa. Word was in fact broken by design, from the outset -- and it 
only got worse from there."

Virgil

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