[Hitch]

Originally Posted by mrmikel

I can see the problem though. What you are describing, Hitch, is much how you would create a document in Sigil. If you can do Sigil, if you want, you can do Word.

Sort of. It's really not quite the same. Everyone here knows I love Sigil, but there are, quite simply, things that can be easily done in Word that would not-so-easily be done in Sigil--and some things that can't be replicated, not unless done manually. It's not just headers and plain paragraphs; and there are many functions in Word that would be enormously helpful to any writer--fiction, non-fiction, etc. that are sadly overlooked, and replaced with all sorts of make-do scenarios, rather than using the easiest available. Just because they don't want to research it, or suffer through a few minutes of a Toot. Seems silly to me.

But if you have trouble with one you are going to have trouble with the other.

That's possibly quite likely true.

It may be a bit unfair, but I detect among some authors an attitude along the lines of "I am the great artiste, the next Shakespeare, I need not trouble myself with details, my words are golden and must be laid out on the page thus, as I also am the next Leonardo Da Vinci."

Such a person is not going to condescend to learn his/her tools.

I think I'll pass on commenting on that. I don't see how I possibly could and still manage to stay out of trouble. Suffice it to say, given what my business does, I do tend to run into a lot of authors (by sheer definition) that have not/do not/don't want to learn how to use Word. Or any other writing/drafting tool. And some of you have heard me get uber-cranky about poets in particular, and page layout.

If you are Winston Churchill you can truly say, "I am a great man." Most of these people are only illustrative of Ted Sturgeon's law: "85% of everything is crap."

Well, crap writing or not doesn't mean that someone can't spend an hour or two and learn how to use their tools. Presumably, somehow, they learned how to key on a keyboard (mostly). Presumably, they've learned how to send/receive email, attach files, use Track Changes...it's not a giant leap for Mankind to learn how to use the basics of a word-processing program.

However, I'm at the "I give up" stage about this; I don't expect to see that any time soon. BUT, that being said, here on MR, I do expect to see that at least some of you come to realize that it's not Word that generates the "cruft" inasmuch as the users. AWP may well make the output less "cruft-ful," and if so, good for it, but as we tend to be creatures of logic here, let's try to do adequate analysis of the real "HTML output" issues with Word (or OO, LO, AWP, Jutoh, etc.) when we discuss what outputs good/bad source code. That's all I'm sayin'.

Hitch