Re: Emacs as word processor

[Yuri Khan]

On Fri, Nov 22, 2013 at 9:48 PM, Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> wrote:

> I guess you've never used any of the *Office word processors, because
> they allow this quite easily: there's a font selection combo on the
> tool bar, and a size selection combo right next to it.

Yes, and those, along with the <bold> <italic> <underline> buttons,
are a sure way to create an unmaintainable document. It is easy and
predictable at first and is fine if you only need to hack up a quick
page, print it out and not even bother to save it. But when writing
any kind of a long-lived document, direct formatting is a curse.

I have often said that the one way to fix Word is to have all direct
formatting controls hidden by default, and only allow style-based
formatting. (This is roughly equivalent to stripping HTML Transitional
down to HTML Strict and doing all styling via CSS.)