The ribbon bar a dozen years on

[ian]

I love the concept of styles and always use them (I come from a DTP background, and that's the way you do things), it's just the curiously inept Microsoft implementation of the feature.

[HTFB]

We've been told firmly that proper use of MS Word styles is essential if the document is going to be published, because they are a necessary condition for creating an accessible PDF. Whether we like them or not.

Government is supposed to be moving to open document formats, but the next tectonic closure of the Atlantic is in my Outlook calendar for about then so I'll probably miss the training.

[caerau]

Well I'm academic so all publishing styles are either - don't use one at all - or use the journal template.   I just think it's very handy to have lots of extra functionality available without all that tedious farting about in menus - which of course was always more tedious by constantly moving everything around between versions.

[Kim]

I can't help feeling that the rot set in when we gave people WYSIWYG word processors, and all the UI in the world isn't going to stop naive users abusing the invisible markup in the name of "well, it looks okay to me".  Which is fine if it's 1994 and you're writing a letter to fax to your travel agent.

[ian]

The problem with Word is that uses styles whether you want them or not, or even know about their existence. And the default is a nest of dependent styles. Untangling a document is thus a task that involves some of the bigger swears. Start with a blank canvas, ffs. The problem with Word is that it's massively overcomplex for 99% of users, and for the 1% who need the complexity, the implementation is often bizarre and ill-conceived. And for things that just ought to work, like placing graphics and easy WYSIWYG layout, they still don't seem to work in any meaningful manner. If anything, the main aim of the designers seems to be to introduce multiple methods of engendering frustration in any and all categories of users. In which case, they've been successful beyond imagination.

Part of the problem is, of course, the need to keep adding new features – let's face it, word processors had everything they needed two decades ago.

[Morat]

I can't help feeling that the rot set in when we gave people WYSIWYG word processors, and all the UI in the world isn't going to stop naive users abusing the invisible markup in the name of "well, it looks okay to me".  Which is fine if it's 1994 and you're writing a letter to fax to your travel agent.

I'm not a Word/Office fan but I look back to the days of submitting LaTeX files for coursework with absolutely no nostalgia. Of course a lowly undergrad only merited 20Mb of storage back then.

[Morat]

Part of the problem is, of course, the need to keep adding new features – let's face it, word processors had everything they needed two decades ago.

Absolutely this!

[barakta]

Yeah styles are necessary for accessibility but word makes them HORRID and powerpoint is even worse... You end up with epic styles cruft which is impossible to resolve without unformatting the document and starting out from scratch... And you'll find there's body text and paragraph text and default text all trying to do the same thing.  As a rule I was only a handful of styles, H1-4, body quote, inline quote, bullets, table text, and the basic underline, bold, italic as needed and then the things like table captions figure captions etc which are then accessible.

PDF isn't very accessible to many visually impaired folk anyway cos some of the magnifier packages won't work with them properly, so the most accessible thing to do is accessible word docs.   

[Jaded]

pdf for blind people depends on how the file was produced. Unless it is produced in an accessible way there is a risk that columns of text don’t work - they appear line by line across the page, rather than down each column.

[jsabine]

Text boxes can be entertaining too if the reading order isn't set up right - at the end, at the beginning, scattered randomly through the file with no apparent association with he page they appear on ...

[barakta]

pdf for blind people depends on how the file was produced. Unless it is produced in an accessible way there is a risk that columns of text don’t work - they appear line by line across the page, rather than down each column.

Yeah, the reading order is one thing, but apparently it's not just that, Zoomtext one of the big magnifiers apparently doesn't handle them well even when the PDF is correctly accessible which AiSquared the developer only reluctantly admits. A friend has taken legal cases over it against the MoJ (and won) over PDF only documents and it's partly why EHRC produce most of their stuff in parallel Word and PDF versions. One of those things that should work, but doesn't in practice for certain users and ends up being very stressful to prove and deal with.