[PLUG] Restated: My Holy Quest for a WYSIWYG Word Processor

["Casey Bralla \(Mail List\) via plug" <plug@lists.phillylinux.org>]

We've had a great discussion of this topic, and I greatly appreciate all the thought and care that has gone into the excellent info y'all have provided.

As Soren and Steve (and maybe others) have pointed out, the discussion drifted because I really misstated the problem.

Here's my problem:

"I do a lot of writing and like to take great care in the presentation of that writing.  The finished output should be spelled properly, be clear and concise, and be formatted professionally.  I often use "standard" features of word processors to create chapters, footnotes, lists, and various fonts or indents to identify flashbacks or other portions of the text.

"I often find that it is very difficult to format the document the way I want using LibreOffice Write.  Often, I will make a small change to one portion of the document, and unexpected changes appear in other portions of the document.  I often cannot understand why those changes appear.  This limits my ability to format the document the way I would prefer.

"In the old days when I used WordPerfect, I could examine the actual formatting codes, and quickly understand how they worked and what effect each code produced.  This allowed me to control the format precisely, and I easily got the formatting I desired.  I also felt more creative since I knew that I could achieve the format I wanted.

"I had thought a simple HTML authoring program that allowed me to see in real time what the output looked like would give me this same result, provided it also included features such as chapters, footnotes, indents, lists, etc.  HTML seemed like a natural coding system, but is only one potential technical path to being able to create well-formatted documents.

"Does anybody know of a word processing program that will let me see an accurate real-time representation of the output while I write, as well as allow me to truly understand how the format of that writing is being generated so that I can control that format?

"TIA"

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