chuq%plaid@Sun.COM (Chuq Von Rospach) (05/22/87)
Date: Tue, 19 May 87 18:33:44 edt
From: Ellis Oliver Jones <seismo!umix!apollo!oj>
Organization: Apollo Computer, Chelmsford, MA
Word 3.0's style control mechanism is good, but I can think
of an enhancement I'd like to see.
As it is now, the unit of style-setting is the whole paragraph,
and one default combination of font/size/character-style per
paragraph is allowed.
For the purpose of writing stuff like computer documentation, it
would be nice if I could have N combinations of font and character
size per style. For example, I might want to typographically
distinguish the following from each other:
Normal: Ordinary narrative text Serif font
Emphasis: Emphasized text Serif italic font
Symbol-name: Names of symbols Sans-serif font
Reserved-word: IF, BEGIN, END, the like Sans-serif bold font
It would be nice if I could systematically change the typography used
for these items using style control. For example, I might like to
try printing Symbols and reserved words in a typewriter font, then
again in Highway Gothic (oops, I mean Helvetica).
Is there a way of doing such systematic control of the typography
within paragraphs?
If not, it seems to me that the RTF format WORD puts out could be
subjected to an edit operation that could do things like
"For all Bold NewYork text in Normal paragraphs, change it to Plain Helvetica"
It looks like RTF is simple enough that a rather trivial filter program
in C could work.
Has anyone tried to do this?
Has anyone succeeded in getting Microsoft to send them the writeup on
the RTF (rich text format)? There's a US mail address in the Word encyclopedia
which offers to send the RTF documentation, but so far they've taken a month.
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Chuq Von Rospach chuq@sun.COM [I don't read flames]
There is no statute of limitations on stupidity