So again, the limitations of the software force us to come up with tedious workarounds. The same with user styles: Word processors shouldn’t offer buttons for bold/italics/underline. They should only offer styles. If people would have to go through the style dialog every time to make something bold, they’d adopt using styles in a no time (and refrain from using 16 different fonts per page just because there is a selection box in the toolbar).

• “Hello!” instead of “Hello!” renders as ”Hello!” – fail (note the incorrect opening quote).

• Then punctuation and formatting. Punctuation characters are formatted the same as the adjacent text but I’ve seen things like “{\em Hello}!” or “{\em Hello!}” numerous times which will render as “Hello!” or “Hello!”, respectively. The latter of which looks really ugly and yes, there the exclamation mark actually touches the closing quotation mark (because the quotation marks weren’t made italic).

• Thin space for abbreviations, e. g. “e. g.”, “i. e.”, &c. How many people do you know who know that there needs to be a \, after the first full-stop?

Besides, every non-trivial (i. e. everything more than a few paragraphs) needs custom formatting to get right. LaTeX can take you maybe 90 % of the way but no further. And documents lacking the final 10 percent do look as horrible as documents lacking every sense of good formatting. But I digress.

As for selection in word processors: Why should the selection follow the format, i. e. be tilted for italic text? The user doesn’t gain much that way since they already see that the selected text is italic. Also it’s pretty much the only style that actually alters the shape of the characters (or their bounding box). For a selection it’s usually very much clearer what styles are used than for a single caret between two characters. On that topic Jef Raskin wrote a few pages in his book The Humane Interface (p. 136 ff.) although I don’t particularly agree with him on that part. Plus he touches only text insertion and deletion (and a little bit of selection), yet no formatting.

But formatting is an interesting matter. I’ve helped a friend (medicine student) a while ago formatting a part of her thesis and I noticed a very interesting, but rather disturbing thing: She didn’t think of a header in terms of “Hey, this is a heading, how can I format it as such?” which would have actually been easy since Word 2007 made the styles much more accessible than the physical formatting tools, but instead she thought “Hey, this is a heading, how can I make it large and bold?”. And that somewhat hurt. Large documents are never formatted directly with bold, italic and font sizes. You are using styles. Be that Word, Writer or LaTeX you have some facilities for telling the application “This is a heading” or “This should be emphasized”.¹ But when you then see people who write dozens of pages and still just think of the word processor as a slightly more colorful typewriter then you actually ask yourself whether the way we think of writing documents the right way is actually right.

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¹ Though with LaTeX it’s really just a bunch of allegedly semantic macros around a bunch of physical formatting macros around a bunch of physical formatting commands, as a user it’s sometimes hard to figure out what is semantic in nature and what’s not and there goes a big part of LaTeX’s advantage in this respect, in my eyes.

Just think of italics. How does this look: “Hello!” Often, the “!” touches the ending quote. I’ve seen text editors where the exclamation mark was actually rendered over the quote so it looks as if I had started with double quotes and ended with a single quote! Or when I used single quotes, they didn’t show up at all.

In word processors, when you mark italic text, then you have either a rectangular blue rectangle (so the text leaks) or you get a tilted box and ugly gaps when you mark text surrounding the italic words.

If something so simple doesn’t work, it’s telling something. It says: There is a lot of room for improvement.

Maybe one can even take this further by putting little overlays around the cursor that show the formatting at that point. However, the question is (at least for word processors) whether that should follow the formatting or rather the style. As no one in their right mind would try formatting larger documents with physical formatting.

One exception are HTML editors where the cursor has two positions (one inside the element and one outside). CKEditor for example will behave differently when you move the cursor into/out of a range. That said, if several elements end at a certain position, you can only exit them all at once. So it’s not perfect, either.