[ale] avoiding word processor style/formatting pain [was: Re: [OT] Organization Ideas]

[dkg at fifthhorseman.net (Daniel Kahn Gillmor)]

On Wed 2007-11-28 13:48:09 -0500, Thompson Freeman wrote:

> getting text into her word processor (Mac Word) such that making a
> small change doesn't screw up the entire formatting job,

With OpenOffice, there are some references to using styles that i
found quite decent at accomplishing what you're doing here:

  http://documentation.openoffice.org/manuals/oooauthors2/0206WG-IntroductionToStyles.pdf
  http://oooauthors.org/en/authors/userguide2/

you can think of using styles in a word processor as akin to using CSS
for your HTML.  Keeping a reasonably clean separation of style from
content allows you to make content changes without dragging yourself
through more formatting pain, and it allows you to experiment with
document-wide style adjustments without tedium.

If she's stuck on Mac OS, NeoOffice is the version of OpenOffice that
runs natively under OS X:

 http://neooffice.org/

Sorry i don't have anything to offer in the way of other organizing
suggestions.   i'm a disorganized person myself! :P

hth,

        --dkg
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