Everything good about Python except GUI IDE?

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Mon, 29 Feb 2016 01:29 am, BartC wrote:

> 20 years ago, when these things were simpler, MS Word had a mind of its
> own even then. I had to produce a manual of few hundred pages, with
> diagrams and images, and it just wasn't going to happen. Not without
> spending a year on it. And employing someone to do it cost thousands.

So you're saying that somebody else knew how to do it, but you didn't, so it
would take you a year?

I find it hard to believe that Word 20 years ago couldn't deal with
something as small as a couple of hundred pages with diagrams. I find it
much easier to believe that you're the sort of guy who would rather spend
three days inventing your solution from scratch (involving your own custom
programming language no less) than three hours reading the manual of the
existing solution.


> In the end I spent a week or two throwing together some simple mark-up 
> language, written in my own editor, which was then processed by my own 
> script language and ending up (via my own graphics software along the 
> way) as Postscript. The results were perfect.

/s/three days/two weeks/


> (Have you ever had a situation where you have to edit a bit of text 
> where a word is in italic or has some particular style. You delete the 
> word, and try and add some more text, but it persists in using the style 
> of the deleted text rather than the current style. You move further 
> away; still the same. You end up deleting everything including every 
> trace of that word and its style. Yet start typing on a now blank 
> document, and it's still the wrong style!

You know that Word lets you reset the style to plain (Roman) text? There's
no need to delete the entire line, let alone the entire document. Text
styles are toggled: just hit Ctrl-I (or is it Ctrl-Shift-I, it's been a
while since I've used Word) to toggle italic on and off. Even if the
current paragraph defaults to italic, you can still toggle it off that way.




-- 
Steven