5 ms·

> I'm surprised nobody mentioned Pages on a Mac. It's a style sheet-based tool, where the styles are quite easy to work with. ... Pages works just fine, and pro

> I'm surprised nobody mentioned Pages on a Mac. It's a style sheet-based tool, where the styles are quite easy to work with. ... Pages works just fine, and produces nicely-formatted documents. Microsoft Word is also a styles-based tool, and produces nicely-formatted documents that are consistent with a stylesheet. The problem is that people don't use the styles.

tripzilch 13y ago
I tried doing that in Word once, it's nowhere near the solid foundation that actual style sheets provide (thinking of CSS/HTML here). I only needed to style H1, H2, P, EM and possibly A (they don't have those names in Word, but you get the point). That's probably the simplest document structures you can have for a task that reasonably makes use of styles. The biggest problem was, those styles are like liquid, slipping between your fingers as you work with them. You do one thing to the text and suddenly you find yourself in a style that's "adapted" from a style you've already defined, I think I've even encountered a new hybrid style between two of my user-defined ones. And then there's of course the "built in" paragraph and heading styles, occasionally thrown into the mix as well. The point is, this is not at all like an actual style sheet based way of working, such as with CSS/HTML. You could get the above result by using (bad) code such as <h2><p><em>OOPS</em></p></h2>, you'd also get a mix of three styles. But the thing is, in Word, all these new hybrid styles got added to the style sheet! So get this, I wrote part of a document, decided (as long as I have to do this in Word ..) I'd use style sheets, made the styles, continued writing on the document and the existing styles changed as I moved bits of text around. Not having exactly that happen, is one of the main reasons to have a strict separation of content and style in the first place, is it not? I'm sorry but, I don't think Word actually supports "styles". It's got some stuff that kind of looks like styles, but once you actually try to use it, it'll just waste your time at exactly those moments where you'd expect a proper styles system to save you time. At some point I had finished the content and I decided to make the H2 a bit bigger font. With styles that should be the easiest thing right? Haha! Right. That's when you get to see all the adapted styles that suddenly appeared in your H2's markup, and they don't change along. So instead of just changing your styles, you are going to have to edit your document content anyway. The whole experience was very, very messy. In hindsight I'd have preferred to keep the "style sheet" in my head and apply all the markup manually, like most people do, instead of relying on the program to take care of this for me, but wasting my time instead. No wonder that's the route most people seem to take. (disclaimer: this experience was a few years ago, maybe they fixed it by now and styles are actually styles and don't change while editing your content, and are in fact either applied to some part of the content or not, and not somewhere in between)
- pge 13y ago
  This post begs the question - can Word be replaced with HTML/CSS? What if there were a WYSIWYG HTML/CSS editor? HTML would provide the intechangable document format; the ubiquity of browsers means everyone already has a document viewer; it would allow those with a desire for greater control to edit text directly in a text editor, separate from the presentation layer; and documents could be formatted for different presentation on screen and when printed; and while we're at it, we could replace powerpoint too. I'm a LaTeX addict and not an HTML guru, so I'm sure there's a reason this solution doesnt work, but it seems intriguing.
  - daemin 13y ago
    I don't think replacing Word documents with HTML/CSS is viable, since they specify content for two different formats. HTML is suited to flowing content like a river, whereas Word is for documents meant to fit on a printed page, like on a stone tablet. You'd have to create quite complicated style templates to get HTML formatted to fit onto pages.
  - tripzilch 13y ago
    I was merely commenting on the usability of "style sheets" in Word, not arguing that one thing should replace another. For instance, I can easily imagine that the run-of-the-mill "markup" WYSIWYG workflow in Word is an excellent fit for writing a short formal letter. Although, a few years ago, a couple of friends of mine were working on their masters theses in non-computer related fields (literature and biology), they complained about Word and its tendency to get somewhat "wonky" when working with very large documents (I am glad I have never had to experience such a task). I talked to them about the basic ideas behind the LaTeX workflow, that writing the text and doing layout/styling are straight from the start intended to be two separate concepts--you're either working on one or the other. And how the text content is also just that: a plain text file with a few document structure-related codes in it. A plain text file doesn't lose whole sections or mangles up chapters for no apparent reason. I was surprised to hear their reaction, they were very intrigued and would have been readily prepared to learn the basics of LaTeX, if it meant getting that peace-of-mind: that writing a large chunk of text means that it is there, without a program doing behind-the-scenes modifications on it if you decide to move parts around, or so. I say "would have been" because they were already quite far in their theses so it would've made little sense to make the switch still. Because that's really the point, isn't it? That's what annoys me about Word (and a lot of other word processing software btw), it just won't keep its fingers off my document, and all sorts of things happen under-the-hood. With LaTeX (and similar solutions, perhaps Markdown) the whole workflow is different: first you write the content, with some minimal markup and structuring codes, and that's a text file. It's yours and nobody, no software is going to touch it. It's source code. And only then you apply a program to it, in order to compile it to a display format. But that program will not touch your source. I really like it that way. I understand it's not for everyone on the consumer market, but it's interesting to consider how different that paradigm is.

tripzilch 13y ago

I tried doing that in Word once, it's nowhere near the solid foundation that actual style sheets provide (thinking of CSS/HTML here). I only needed to style H1, H2, P, EM and possibly A (they don't have those names in Word, but you get the point). That's probably the simplest document structures you can have for a task that reasonably makes use of styles. The biggest problem was, those styles are like liquid, slipping between your fingers as you work with them. You do one thing to the text and suddenly you find yourself in a style that's "adapted" from a style you've already defined, I think I've even encountered a new hybrid style between two of my user-defined ones. And then there's of course the "built in" paragraph and heading styles, occasionally thrown into the mix as well. The point is, this is not at all like an actual style sheet based way of working, such as with CSS/HTML. You could get the above result by using (bad) code such as <h2><p><em>OOPS</em></p></h2>, you'd also get a mix of three styles. But the thing is, in Word, all these new hybrid styles got added to the style sheet! So get this, I wrote part of a document, decided (as long as I have to do this in Word ..) I'd use style sheets, made the styles, continued writing on the document and the existing styles changed as I moved bits of text around. Not having exactly that happen, is one of the main reasons to have a strict separation of content and style in the first place, is it not? I'm sorry but, I don't think Word actually supports "styles". It's got some stuff that kind of looks like styles, but once you actually try to use it, it'll just waste your time at exactly those moments where you'd expect a proper styles system to save you time. At some point I had finished the content and I decided to make the H2 a bit bigger font. With styles that should be the easiest thing right? Haha! Right. That's when you get to see all the adapted styles that suddenly appeared in your H2's markup, and they don't change along. So instead of just changing your styles, you are going to have to edit your document content anyway. The whole experience was very, very messy. In hindsight I'd have preferred to keep the "style sheet" in my head and apply all the markup manually, like most people do, instead of relying on the program to take care of this for me, but wasting my time instead. No wonder that's the route most people seem to take. (disclaimer: this experience was a few years ago, maybe they fixed it by now and styles are actually styles and don't change while editing your content, and are in fact either applied to some part of the content or not, and not somewhere in between)

pge 13y ago
This post begs the question - can Word be replaced with HTML/CSS? What if there were a WYSIWYG HTML/CSS editor? HTML would provide the intechangable document format; the ubiquity of browsers means everyone already has a document viewer; it would allow those with a desire for greater control to edit text directly in a text editor, separate from the presentation layer; and documents could be formatted for different presentation on screen and when printed; and while we're at it, we could replace powerpoint too. I'm a LaTeX addict and not an HTML guru, so I'm sure there's a reason this solution doesnt work, but it seems intriguing.
- daemin 13y ago
  I don't think replacing Word documents with HTML/CSS is viable, since they specify content for two different formats. HTML is suited to flowing content like a river, whereas Word is for documents meant to fit on a printed page, like on a stone tablet. You'd have to create quite complicated style templates to get HTML formatted to fit onto pages.
- tripzilch 13y ago
  I was merely commenting on the usability of "style sheets" in Word, not arguing that one thing should replace another. For instance, I can easily imagine that the run-of-the-mill "markup" WYSIWYG workflow in Word is an excellent fit for writing a short formal letter. Although, a few years ago, a couple of friends of mine were working on their masters theses in non-computer related fields (literature and biology), they complained about Word and its tendency to get somewhat "wonky" when working with very large documents (I am glad I have never had to experience such a task). I talked to them about the basic ideas behind the LaTeX workflow, that writing the text and doing layout/styling are straight from the start intended to be two separate concepts--you're either working on one or the other. And how the text content is also just that: a plain text file with a few document structure-related codes in it. A plain text file doesn't lose whole sections or mangles up chapters for no apparent reason. I was surprised to hear their reaction, they were very intrigued and would have been readily prepared to learn the basics of LaTeX, if it meant getting that peace-of-mind: that writing a large chunk of text means that it is there, without a program doing behind-the-scenes modifications on it if you decide to move parts around, or so. I say "would have been" because they were already quite far in their theses so it would've made little sense to make the switch still. Because that's really the point, isn't it? That's what annoys me about Word (and a lot of other word processing software btw), it just won't keep its fingers off my document, and all sorts of things happen under-the-hood. With LaTeX (and similar solutions, perhaps Markdown) the whole workflow is different: first you write the content, with some minimal markup and structuring codes, and that's a text file. It's yours and nobody, no software is going to touch it. It's source code. And only then you apply a program to it, in order to compile it to a display format. But that program will not touch your source. I really like it that way. I understand it's not for everyone on the consumer market, but it's interesting to consider how different that paradigm is.