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Comment by solarkraft | Hacker News Reader

I'm still waiting for a document editor to approach styling sensibly. I don't want to explicitly set color, text size and others, I want to define style classes that I can easily change later.

I know that the office programs theoretically support this, but I found the flow so terrible to be impractical - no wonder casual users don't use it (all the way to many programmers hating WYSIWYG because they hate the process of manual styling so much).

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FrameMaker and Interleaf did this pretty well. And SGML-based tools, and TeX/LaTeX, of course.

The Microsoft Word way has always seemed to support styles more like they were grafted on as an afterthought, without wanting to disturb the least-knowledgeable users, to the point that knowledgeable users have to tiptoe around all the UI that breaks styles.

Framemaker was great, was the tool used by most US military contractors in 90s. Many well known aircraft were designed using this document tool. I still try to configure MS Word to work like it.

Exactly. Interleaf was structured-oriented like that, only a bit moreso. (I designed "styles" heavily in all 3 tools, plus some others.)

Regarding mil/aero, I heard (possibly incorrect) that Boeing did some documentation in Interleaf, and part of routine preservation of those engineering artifacts was to archive... an entire Apollo Domain workstation network. Even though later/other versions of Interleaf were available on later platforms. I guess they weren't going to take any chances.

> to the point that knowledgeable users have to tiptoe around all the UI that breaks styles

I'm glad I'm not the only one that feels this way.

With some discipline, styles as the sole method of formatting text works well in InDesign, fine in Affinity Publisher, and is possible with heavy caveats in Scribus.

I used to use GREP (regex) styles in InDesign to format heavily structured elements in docs down to specific words without ever touching the style bar.

I also used Framemaker for years, and the DITA open toolkit as well. I get why programmers like FM, but XML/XSLT or rigidly structured tools are not the only path or tool for this.

Why is this so difficult? We had styles in Wordstar on CP/M over forty years ago. I don't remember it being difficult.

Dumbfuck-oriented design. As neilv's comment[1] puts it:

> The Microsoft Word way has always seemed to support styles more like they were grafted on as an afterthought, without wanting to disturb the least-knowledgeable users, to the point that knowledgeable users have to tiptoe around all the UI that breaks styles.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40180746

This is basically why I have been using Figma for my resume. It makes it possible to break things into components that make it easy to make many different versions and adjust styling across all of them.

You and I think like this, because we worked on/for the Internet. Unfortunately, other people who use these tools don't think like that.

Styling predates the Internet - Microsoft Word 1.0 for MS-DOS had style sheets. WordPerfect 5.0 introduced styles on that side. Hierarchically structured text documents with headers, paragraphs etc. are even older: IBM Generalized Markup Language began development in 1969.

Lack of tooling for hierarchical structure manipulation is the mark of aiming for the lowest common denominator - casuals who edit short documents one-off.

Microsoft Word Outline Mode is life. My pet feature request: outline mode - with a ticket opened to Libreoffice since 2011, preceded by an Openoffice feature request from 2002. Probably won't ever happen.

Introducing new UX concepts is always hard, but I'd suggest that most people would understand and appreciate the advantages rather quickly. Everyone knows the pain of manual styling.

Or at least select multiple groups with a similar style at once. So you select the first group of text, then a dotted line will appear around groups of the same styling, and you just hold down control or shift and click each one and it'll highlight then entire group that you clicked.

I know that Apple’s Pages lets you define styles per document, apply them to spans, and then change the style, affecting all spans to which it's applied.

I use LyX for this

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