Understanding Word Processor Series—Part 2

Document formatting and styles

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By Colin Ramsden, April 2006.

This article is the second in a series on understanding word processors. See part 1: Word processor basics.

This series is designed to guide and assist the early user of a word processor through the basics of document construction so that they can produce easily maintainable and manageable documents which are suitable for editing by more experienced users without too much trouble. 

In the previous article (part 1), we showed that when writers new to word processors are not given adequate supervision and assistance, the first real writing task they face is how to control the appearance of their documents. We demonstrated and explored the consequences of how such early users often resort to manually applying layout directly into the text as it is being typed, and subsequently why that method of page layout control is unmaintainable and therefore, not recommended.

In this article (part 2), we will present the recommended method for page layout control using applied formatting styles.

Controlling page layout

The only prerequisite for easy document maintenance (allowing you to readily change the appearance) of document page layout created using a word processor, is that it be constructed from complete sentences and whole paragraphs. As you may recall, this is achieved through the use of 'Word Processing Basic Rule #1'.

To subsequently have the paragraphs align with each other on the page as desired, you should apply appropriately formatted styles which contain the positioning and page layout details suitable for these paragraphs. This will be explained shortly.

The important concept to grasp here is that word processing allows for the document to be separated into its major parts, with the formatting stored separately to the text (data) of the document, and not within with the text of the document. This separation of data from style underlies the basic fundamental relationship between HTML (Hyper-Text Markup Language) and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), and is the foundation principle of XML (eXtensible Markup Language).

 

 

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