Re[2]: WYSIWYG vs Tags

["<Pam Owen>" <powen -at- MAIL2 -dot- LMI -dot- ORG>]

  LaVonna  writes:

  <I'm sure I'll be corrected if wrong, but don't all layout <programs and word
  processors have tags in there someplace, even <if we can't see them?  Being
  able to view them seems like an <advantageous option.

  <Besides, it makes you feel really smart to be able to interpret <tags!


  And it makes me really mad to have to search for them. I'll rant about this
  subject just the one last time - I promise ;-} (that's a winking smiley for
  you, LaVonna). As an editor, in WordPerfect I've spent an inordinate amount of
  time looking for tags (especially the orphan ones that have had their end or
  beginning tag deleted by accident). In Word (which is WYSIWIG), I block the
  text I want to format or unformat, and pick the formatting I want. No
  searching, no wondering what is causing the text to suddently go down 4 points
  in size. I've rarely had a formatting problem that couldn't be handled that
  way.

  For those of you who love tags, try looking through your document (for
  example, in WordPerfect, in the reveal codes window) and see how many tags are
  extraneous - that is, accidentally keyed in or not deleted. Remember that
  deleting one of a pair of tags without the other can be hazardous to your
  mental health. Then think about how easy it is to do just that. And besides,
  who wants to look in a whole other window, which takes up a lot of the screen,
  to try to figure out what is going on. It's WYSIWIG for me, and I edit large,
  unwieldy documents (up to 2,000 pages, filled with tables and graphics) that
  are often originally word-processed by administrative assistants who think
  their computer is a typewriter and that word processing is too esoteric for
  them to ever learn.


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