nisus.com

This is something I began thinking about a long time ago, though something brought it back to me recently.

I work a lot with .doc files produced by collaborators/colleagues using the Chinese edition of Word. Although they generally claim in their CVs to be competent users of Microsoft Office, in 10 years, I have encountered only two who formatted the document they sent me using tabs indents and consistent paragraph styles — I am not even sure if those two knew about templates and style-sheets. The reason is clear to me: Chinese is monospaced, including punctuation, so you can line things up using spaces, and font variations are not so widely used in standard documents. Virtually all of my collaborators — the number has run into hundreds — have no idea about these things, basically using Word like a typewriter and ignoring the weird visual results in English. In view of this, the vast majority have every paragraph style set up by Microsoft, both in Roman and Chinese, included by default in every document ... a huge list, most of the styles on which are not in use in that document, and so long that it makes using the style palette while working on such documents more trouble than it's worth.

Would it be possible to have a command to "Strip unused styles", either as part of a future release of NWP 2 or through a macro?

Thanks
Mark

Excellent idea, Mark. Happens in all English stuff too. My wife /still/ uses the computer like a typewriter ... except when she's editing video in Final Cut Pro. Will go to classes and work through day-long exercises in Final Cut Pro, but won't learn the straightforward basics of NWP.

Cheers, geoff

Geoffrey Heard
Business & Environment Writer, Editor, Publisher
The Worsley Press

greenmorpher wrote:Excellent idea, Mark. Happens in all English stuff too. My wife /still/ uses the computer like a typewriter ... except when she's editing video in Final Cut Pro. Will go to classes and work through day-long exercises in Final Cut Pro, but won't learn the straightforward basics of NWP.

Yes, Geoff, you're right, when you have all those useless MS Word list styles — "Hearts List", "This List", "That List" ... about a dozen of them ... it's bad enough, but when you have Chinese equivalents on top, and half a dozen non-list paragraph styles, and half a dozen character styles for Chinese ...

It's almost as if every time you change to a new font size or face — which my students and collaborators seem to manage to do without being aware — the Chinese version of word adds a new character style to the list, or if it's at the beginning of a new paragraph, a new paragraph style ...

Presumably your wife using NWP only has the styles that are set up in the Nisus New File on her machine ... and NWP doesn't automatically set up a "Hearts List", "Spades LIst", "Diamonds List", "Clubs List" ...


Mark

I'm behind the times … Geoff too perhaps! The release notes say:

Changed: file formats: we should cull unused styles with silly names created automatically during import process.

I've now had a chance to look at files imported from Chinese Word into NWP2 ... they only list four styles from my Nisus Normal template file, none of which are actually applied: "Footer", "Header", "Normal" and "Normal follow". All the rest are culled presumably on the ground that they have "silly names".

That suits me ...

Mark