Quote:
Originally Posted by snarkophilus
I'm certainly guilty of using headers for choosing font sizes for subtitles, etc. I'm curious to see a discussion about this. At the possible risk of dragging up unpleasant memories, do you have pointer to said discussion? I had a quick look and couldn't find it.
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BAD!
BAD BAD!
Okay, so...in less strident tones, it was, in fact, someone that I met here, back 9-10 years ago, that "learned me not to do that."
In a PDF, at least, before now, it didn't matter if you used a heading style for text formatting. A PDF really only cared what something LOOKED like, not what it was. (Altho, this is a bad comparison, as PDFs do not spring into existence full-grown, like Pegasus from the head of Medusa; thus, these things did matter, but bear with me.) But it does matter in Word, in all word-processors, html and ebooks.
Why?
Because headings are
structural, not decorative. They mean something. An h1, for example, is more "important" than an h2. An h3 is less important than that same h2. The use of headings informs the document about the overall
structure of the file. Think of an outline. That's the relevance of headings, in a word.
If you want to see the relevance of headings, and why you oughtn't use them for decoration, take a tutorial or class in using Word's built-in Styles and Headings. Let's see...start with this one, I guess:
http://www.addbalance.com/usersguide...dingStyles.htm and there are numerous courses online.
But the shorter answer is, they're structural. They have NOTHING to do with how text looks. Nothing at all. You tell a given style how text looks, not its heading style.
To understand all of this, you need to learn about Word's built-in styles and then move to headings. Don't say "I don't use Word," the same concepts apply to all word processors whether they are Atlantis or OO or LO or Word or Wordperfect.
Good luck.
Hitch