All reports saved to .docx should use styles instead of specific formatting

Instead of everything being set as “Normal” and over-ridden by character styles most of the paragraphs should be paragraph styles (i.e. all “Generation” should be Heading 1). Every type of paragraph should have a style so if someone wanted to make all burials in Comic Sans and red type they only needed to change the style after the fact in Word and RM wouldn’t need to offer complex formatting options.

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I guess that would be good if all the word processors understood the same styles specification. I don’t know if they do or do not. Not everyone uses Word. I don’t, I use LibreOffice.

Agree. Most Mac users work with the better and free Pages rather than pay for a clumsy microsoft product and styles/fonts probably do not transfer completely.

Using a “style” instead of individual character formatting is a standard in publishing. Style sheets are supported in many things other than Word, and in fact originated well before Word. RTF supports styles, LibreOffice supports style sheets, as well as Pages. Both import DOCX. More sophisticated published tools like InDesign also support styles imported via DOCX.

The reason I use DOCX in the request is it’s the only format RM8 saves in that supports styles. PDF does not as it’s not meant to be edited.

Styles and fonts have transferred properly between platforms for several decades. That’s that one of the reasons that style sheets exist. I’ve been moving documents back and forth between Unix, Mac, and Windows since the 80’s. It works just fine, and yes, even using Microsoft Word documents.

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