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Le 2010-11-04 04:34, Sebastian Spaeth a écrit :
On Wed, 3 Nov 2010 20:55:19 +0100, Johannes Bausch wrote:
things concerning tables. We absolutely HAVE to make the user use the
stylesheet stuff, and it must be so easy that they start to use it on
one-paged documents.
Removing the font chooser, and font-size selector would save lots of
space that could be replaced with a simple style chooser :)

We should not go overboard. While we should _encourage_ people to use styles when they are best used, we should not _force_ them to do so. We will loose the followers we have and not gain any new ones if we impose "the right way".

Besides, there are times when styles are useful and styles should be used much more than they are by most people. But there are many situations where styles add an unncessary level of complexity and a few times when styles are NOT warranted. For instance: - Take this text and assume I want to emphasize one word. I could simply do Ctl-I and get the text in Italics or define a character style and apply it. The character style may be warranted, but it's a multi-step process, and quite frankly, if I decide further down the road to change the entire text from Cambria to Bodoni, the text in Italics will change accordingly and the text defined with a character style may not change appropriately (it may stay in Cambria Italics). On the other hand, if character styles work properly, I may define a "book name" style as it would allow me to change all those from one font to another in a jiffy. - In Desktop publishing, there are times when fragments of text are out of context (ad, poster...). I find it easier not to have a base style for these because neither paragraph nor font information is linked to the rest of the text.

Finally, if we need to train people to the proper use of word-processing software, I would suggest that emphasis be given, in order to the following "nasty" habits:
– proper use of spaces and punctuation (hyphen vs n-dash vs m-dash);
– proper use of indents and tabulations (many people still use spaces or default tabs in succession); – proper use of "space before paragraph" and paragraph-chaining options such as "keep with next paragraph", rather than paragraph returns in series. All these make document modification harder than it needs to be. A couple of short videos might even help educate people very quickly. Speaking of modifications, it is much easier to work with a document that uses the above techniques even if it has no style, than it is to work with an improperly formatted document that has styles.

--
Michel Gagnon
Montréal (Québec, Canada) -- http://mgagnon.net

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