Re: How to make Word STOP rewriting your copy

In article <ufwPXZDrFHA.3160@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Jeff Wiseman <throwawayacct223@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> This is much worse. It is a GUI design FLAW, pure and simple. In
> fact, it likely was NEVER spec'ed by a GUI engineer as it has all
> of the earmarks of a hack by a programmer. All of the formatting
> is embedded inside of this "psuedo character" (i.e., the
> paragraph mark) that is susceptable to all kinds of damage being
> in the middle of the character stream. Since it is an basic
> infrastructure concept (i.e., the implementation for paragraph
> formatting), the original hack from way back when, got totally
> buried by all of the years of evolutionary support code that has
> gone into Word.

What you wrote might be true if you applied it to WordPerfect. However,
you're mistaken wrt Word.

Word documents are not "character streams". They are documents composed
of "stories", such as main, header, footer, etc. The main story is
composed of sections. Sections are composed of paragraphs. Paragraphs
are composed of words, which are composed of characters (I've left some
things out, but the concept remains).

The paragraph mark is a graphical representation of the properties of
the paragraph object, such as language, style, etc. Logically and
physically, it's not in the middle of anything. Text following the
paragraph mark may be in a completely different location in the file
since it belongs to a different paragraph object.

It's an incredibly powerful and efficient method of composing and
processing documents. But it's not as intuitive for most folks as WP or
TextEdit, which do store their text as character streams. And it's
hardly a "hack".
.

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