Document formatting tips
A great article on how to format written documents wisely, though he’s showing it as a way to make docs move from Open Office Writer to Microsoft Word and back. In fact, it is an equally valid point to preserve the prettification between Word versions, or even in the same version but across computers with different setups (like missing fonts).
So how come this is an insight? I believe it is because formatting styles in both Word and Writer are viewed as complex, and goodness knows it is not clear how to manage indentation either. Both applications are improving, trying to intuit when users really should be using styles or indenting when the same formatting changes. That’s a start, but we need to go farther.
An option – and it’s not really as user-friendly as I want, so offer comments – is to force people to use styles. Every time they change a typefont or size, apply it to all items that share the style. When styles start to be more obvious – like when the whole document font changes – then average users will care about them. Clearly there has to be a better way to manage styles, but you need to change the paradigm and the presentation. It will take a bold move to lead this charge with all the momentum built up around the old, bad, WordStar/WordPerfect markup philosophy and habits.
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