[ale] Is there a system to encourage using styles?

[Steve Litt]

On Sat, 3 Oct 2015 12:55:29 -0400 (EDT)
Tom Freeman <tfreeman at intel.digichem.net> wrote:

> 
> I'm thinking that I should mark this [OT], but...
> 
> I took another adjunct gig, and am currently reviewing a colleage's
> (sp?) notes on the course. I _think_ these notes were created MS Word
> for Mac (not certain), but whatever the origin, the change over to
> LibreOffice for me has been causing some uglyness. Little things like
> adding a footer can throw the formatting of the document for a loop,
> since the formatting is based largely on tabs and new paragraph, with
> the odd table or table inserted place in a frame for variety.
> 
> I know many instruction books and courses suggest using styles rather
> than various control characters, but nobody _uses_ styles on a
> deliberate daily basis. I know I first ran into "styles" in a usable
> way about Word Perfect 4.2 or 5.0 (don't remember), but that has been
> a quarter century or so! I appears that most people continue to use
> the word processor in the same way their grandparents used a manual
> typewriter!!
> 
> In a dark thought, it occures to me that a dominant software provider
> is _not_ pressing styles for the simple reason that it isn't their
> fault then that documents are not cross platform, and thus
> organizations must stick to the dominant provider. </paranoia>
> 
> My question is: "Is there a word processor in the wild that
> encourages or requires the concious use of styles and templates for
> the creation of documents?"

LyX. With LyX, it's very difficult to apply appearance directly.

I've halfway specified a markup system called Stylz, which has
absolutely no provision for applying appearance, only styles. But I
never finished it --- it was quite challenging.

SteveT