Comment by gspencley | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gspencley | Hacker News Reader

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It's too bad that that's kind of changed.

Don't get me wrong, I use LibreOffice a lot, but I kind of despise it. The biggest headache I have, with Writer - which is what I use most often - is that if I select text in order to change the formatting, it changes formatting of stuff not selected. I think this has to do with paragraph styling .. it's just very unintuitive how it figures out what belongs to a paragraph or not. My human brain wants to separate paragraphs with line breaks. So why would formatting selected text on one line change the styling on adjacent lines that aren't selected?! It is extremely infuriating how its styling behaves in general.

I think it's also worth noting that rich text formatting is the primary reason to even use a word processor instead of a plain text editor in the first place. Embedded objects and exporting tools are all useful too. But most of what I use Writer for could be done in a text editor if I didn't need styling. So all these years later, a core feature - arguably THE core feature that necessitates the existence of the application to begin with - is still broken and unintuitive.

And when I search for help on how to get styling things working etc. and I find posts by other people that share these concerns, the answers are legacy document formats etc. that contain these bugs by design so it's something that's really hard for the developers to fix.

It's been a while since I've used it, but IIRC this is actually my favorite feature: it encourages the use of stylesheets vs ad-hoc formatting. As annoying as it is in the moment, when it comes time to integrate multiple documents into a consistent whole (or apply entirely new styling), having a stylesheet vs. miles of ad-hoc inline styles makes it fairly painless.

Sadly... The rich text editor I mostly use these days (Google Docs) goes in the complete opposite direction; trying to apply a new stylesheet is mostly a waste of time. Which is why for any non-trivial document, I mostly rely on Markdown -> HTML + CSS.

The way Writer works with styles is same how every other type setting program does it. Indesign, Scribus, Affinity, Quark. Not sure how this would be out of the ordinary. Maybe MS Word doesn't have paragraph styles at all? Not sure i haven't used in in a long while.

Character styles are settings for selected group of characters (things ike emphasis, italic, underline). Paragraph styles are set for whole paragraph you are in. You make new paragraph by hitting enter. If you hit enter twice you make two paragraphs. In paragraph style you define how paragraphs should be separated (empty line, first line indent, rule whaever you want). You should never do what can be done using paragraph style by writing them because later when you want to change them you would have to change it everywhere instead just changing style.

MS Word works with styles in a very similar way, and the appropriate thing to do is modify the styles to match your use case. But Word does not necessarily enforce this, and so creates additional ad-hoc if you manually go in and change specific formatting. Luckily it is fairly easy to make a change like that and then find the real style and tell Word to update the style to match your selection.

Writer does differ from Word in quite an unintuitive way.

Create a document with two one-line paragraphs.

In Word, put the cursor at the start of the first paragraph. Press SHIFT+DOWN. This selects the first paragraph. Apply a paragraph style, Heading 1, say. Paragraph one has the new style, paragraph two does not.

In Writer, do the same thing. The style is applied to both paragraphs!

I use Writer all the time but this funkiness in paragraph selection continues to bug me. You have to select paragraphs excluding the final paragraph mark, which requires more keystrokes than Word's selection behaviour.

My LO Writer (24.8.4.2) only changed the first paragraph. You don't mention if you meant a blank line between the two lines but I added one.

It's still a problem if you leave a blank line. If you make the first line bulleted you now have a bullet on the blank line too.

What do you mean by selecting paragraph? Paragraph styles are applied to the paragraph your line cursor is in or if you highlight/select multiple characters it sets their paragraph to be that paragraph style.

Single character can only be part of a single paragraph. So if you select characters that are in different parahraphs and want to set their paragraph styles it should set all of them.

Ive just tried it in Writer and like i said its seems to be the “norm” how other soft does it (i dont have acess to Word to test that).

While I have never noticed changes in formatting of non-selected things when modifying a style, except for the formats of "bullets and numbering", I had problems with changes in adjacent apparently independent things by the insertion or deletion of formatted text.

To guard against such problems especially in paragraphs that use "bullets and numbering", where the font used for bullets and numbers appears to be linked with the font used on the associated line, I have become used to insert some random letter before the place where I would paste formatted text, if it is a place where this may not work as expected, which blocks any spreading of that format. After pasting the specially formatted text, I delete the previously inserted letter.

This undesired spreading of the formatting style happens only over white spaces and invisible control characters, it does not happen over normal printable characters, so inserting a printable character is guaranteed to contain the style.

This is largely the reason I gave up on rich text editors in favor of a plain text source and some sort of rich text compiler.

There is an absolutely mind boggling amount of programming work that goes into making a WYSIWYG word processor. and this complexity tends to bleed out into editing quirks and corrupted documents. Not that there are no quirks or corruption with an explicit separate compiler it is just that it will not touch your original source, so you can fight the quirks in a systematic way. I think this is why word perfect users love the show codes function so much.

"You know why they call a word processor right? Have you ever seen what a food processor does to food?"

This is largely the reason I gave up on rich text editors in favor of a plain text source and some sort of rich text compiler.

I have written a lot of words in troff/groff + various macros and adjacent tools (eqn, pic) over many years and produced consistently decent if plain looking documents. And I've started using it again. Still covers about 85% of getting words on paper in a readable format. Spent lots of time with LaTeX, too, which produced perhaps nicer looking documents over all (and beautiful mathematics), but at the expense of much more complexity; YMMV.

I suppose Markup is the inheritor.

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