Re[4]: Re. WYSIWYG vs. tags

[powen -at- MAIL -dot- LMI -dot- ORG]

     Pat Madea asked, in response to my statement that Word has no tags, if
     this was true?

     I misspoke when I said Word has no tags. There are tags, but they're
     embedded in the text. The user doesn't see the tags, and usually
     merely blocking and picking the format you want will override any
     other embedded formatting. The only conflicts I've found is the
     occasional layering of character styles on top of paragraph styles
     that contain other character formatting in them. However, this is
     rarely a problem and can always (in my experience) be overcome with
     manual formatting.

     Again, IMONSHO, WYSIWYG programs such as Word and Ami Pro present much
     fewer problems because the codes are embedded and cannot be
     accidentally deleted. The DOS WP version, while cumbersome, was very
     reliable. The WP developers seem to have dropped the ball when Windows
     came along and didn't redesign the software for a Windows environment.
     Instead, they seem to have added a whole bunch of Band-Aids to the DOS
     program. I'm no techie, but that's my impression. That would explain
     why WP for Windows, fully loaded, takes up 35 MB, while Word takes up
     25 MB. It might also account for WP's dreadfully slow processing, its
     requirement for more than 8 MB of RAM to run smoothly, and its
     penchant for blowing up. I've got 16 MB of RAM on my 486/66, with
     plenty of space on my hard drive, and WP still blows up on a regular
     basis, particularly when I try to format large chunks of text without
     going in and manually removing every tag I don't want.

     Pam Owen
     Nighthawk Communications
     Reston, VA
     Nighthawk1 -at- aol -dot- com, or powen -at- lmi -dot- org