I wish word processors worked like HTML/CSS. I prefer to write in a print-like format, with text in a proportional font and emphasis indicated in italics. But a final manuscript should (by silly industry convention) be in typewriter-like format, with text in a monospaced font and emphasis indicated with underlines. Now, it's easy to tell OpenOffice to change the "text body" font style (and line spacing, and indentation, and all of that stuff), but why is there no way to tell it to change how emphasis is indicated?
Okay, twelve seconds of research indicates that you can in fact use the extended options in "Find and Replace" to select all italicized text, but that's not the point, now is it? It just makes sense to have a style-dependent "emphasis" and "strong" mode. If I wrote in HTML with a CSS stylesheet, I could restyle the whole thing in seconds without altering the text. Why can't you do that in a word processor?
Shouldn't you be doing all your writing in some LaTeX frontend?
comment by Sumana Harihareswara (email) (www) // Saturday, the 23rd of January, 2010, at 11:18 at night
Seconded.
comment by Mike// Saturday, the 23rd of January, 2010, at 11:21 at night
Word processors are designed for writing; LaTeX is designed for printing. I don't want to write markup that generates text, I just want to write text. But I want to then be able to style the text the way it needs to look for submission as a manuscript. In short, I just want the OpenOffice style editor to be more powerful.
comment by Martin// Saturday, the 23rd of January, 2010, at 11:39 at night
That said, I'll play with LyX. If it doesn't distract from the act of writing, which is of course the important thing, then I'll give it a go.
comment by Martin// Sunday, the 24th of January, 2010, at 12:14 at night
I'll tell you this much—I should not have to edit my damn keymappings to make CTRL-I mean "italicize". Okay, technically it means "emphasize" (which is the whole point, that you can change whether that means italics or underlining) but if they really think that they can train me to use CTRL-E instead, they're incredibly wrong. I'm not going to use a different shortcut for one program than I do for every other text interface ever created.
I am not yet sure how I feel about the salmon-pink background. On the one hand, what the hell? But on the other, maybe it'll help with the "blank empty white screen of dismay" effect.
comment by Martin// Sunday, the 24th of January, 2010, at 12:37 at night
Okay, this is lame. If you set it to one of their default document classes, like "article" or "book", you have minimal control over how your document displays—much, much less than with the OO.org style editor. And you can't even switch between italics and underline, which was the whole damn point! To do that, you'd have to write a custom document class in LaTeX. Here's what the documentation says about that: "When it's finally time to get your hands dirty and create or edit your own layout file, the following sections describe what you're up against. Our advice is to go slowly, save and test often, listen to soothing music, and enjoy one or two of your favorite adult beverages; more if you are getting particularly stuck. It's really not that hard, except that the multitude of options can become overwhelming if you try to do to much in one sitting. Go have another adult beverage, just for good measure." I use my adult beverages to write, thanks.
Even if it weren't for that huge and fatal flaw, I don't really see the point. As much as it knocks WYSIWYG word processors, I don't see a difference between a well-laid-out WYSIWYG document (using styles properly) and a document laid out in a WYSIWYM editor, except that in the latter you don't know what it'll look like until you generate the document. Maybe a typesetter who knew LaTeX would plotz over this, but a writer? If it came with a class for manuscripts, I'd consider it. If it gave you the ability to add new environments (and, better still, classes) with a straightforward dialog box, I'd say it was roughly as good for writing as a word processor (with the extra advantage that if I did get published, the typesetter would probably be delighted to receive a LyX file instead of a PDF or ODF). But not better.
My point remains: Give OO's style editor box an extra field to allow me to change whether emphasis is done as italics or underline. That's all I want.
comment by Martin// Sunday, the 24th of January, 2010, at 1:07 at night
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