[CentOS] Word Perfect [Was: Novell sale news?]

[Adam Tauno Williams]

On Tue, 23 Nov 2010, Les Mikesell wrote:
> On 11/23/2010 12:55 PM, m.roth at 5-cent.us wrote:
>>> I have never used word processing programs for much of anything
>>> serious, using vim and groff or docbook xml for most things.
>> I've done lots of documents, documentation, and even some published
>> articles in SysAdmin (before it sadly went under), and everyone wants word
>> processing docs; up through the end of the nineties, it was all WP, then
>> it shifted to *bleah* Word.
>> <snip>
> I'm not exactly a word processing expert, but I always thought the trick
> to make Word tolerable was to never apply raw formatting to individual
> pieces of text but instead make some styles of your own so you can
> subsequently modify the style definitions and have it take effect
> throughout the document.

Well, if you know what a "style" is you are closer to being a word 
processing "expert" than many - because what you describe is the proper 
way to use a Word Processor and has been since far back into the hey 
day of products like WP.

It is always a bear to get users to use the Stylist (as OOo calls it, 
every word processor has an equivalent).  But once you get them around 
that corner most of the problems disappear and they'll never choose to go 
back to hacks like highlight-click-bold.  It is not more complicated, as 
they first always complain, its simpler and faster; and as the document 
grows *way* more managable - or, I take that back - it *is* manageble.

[always amused at people who have powerfully strong opinions about a 
category of applications rought one sentance after saying they almost 
never use them].