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WIZMOGRAPHY is the science of cluttering simplicity with useless functionalities poorly explained.
Wizmography appears to have a lucri causa inasmuch as it is based on the notion that: you can do more with more. Since we all want to do our most (so that we can acquire most) we go out and purchase a program which will allow us to do as much as possible in every conceivable way. Of course, while most of us are fundamentally capable of the proverbial "anything," most of us also discover that we do best when we limit ourselves to working on one or a few things at most. As they say, "less is more."
Alas, the New Year ran us straight into the toils of wizmography.
With Auld Lang Syne fondness for an Old Application forced forgot, we chipsters have reluctantly moved our chipping operation onto Intel's block. Running an outdated program in emulation on an outdated PPC platform was less and less of an option as progre$$ moved relentlessly on.
That left us looking for a word processing program to replace the venerable Word Perfect. Alas, again, there is none; not for writers at least.
Since we had had some not entirely awful experience with Appleworks we looked at Apple's latest office suite app, Pages. There, on its home page, -- in unmistakable applestyle -- was a very spiffy and bright picture of a letter-sized page with an over-sized and radiantly colorful picture of a butterfly, next to which there appeared a four line caption in barely visible Ariel grey. Wow! That's quite a dissertation there.
We clicked away. Obviously Apple knows nothing about writing. You know… that stuff whose boring, colorless graphics consists of the alphabet. Yes, the alphabet, Mother of All Graphics.
So after more clicking we downloaded LIBRE OFFICE, a free, open source, copy-lefted, collaborated, cross-platform, cross-border effort. We like the idea of Anarcho-Coding and fervently hope it succeeds in tumbling the walls of corporate monopoly, exploitation and oppression. But a word processor Libre Office is not.
As with most of the Suite Gang, Libre Office confuses printing with writing and although it offers a cornucopia of neat and nifty stuff for printing, presenting publishing, linking, hypertexting, spread-sheeting, and databasing, it provides nothing for the process of writing -- that is for the process of thinking with the aid of an alphabet. Word Perfect was and remains the only application which understood what would better be called word scratching than word processing.
That left us looking for a word processing program to replace the venerable Word Perfect. Alas, again, there is none; not for writers at least.
Since we had had some not entirely awful experience with Appleworks we looked at Apple's latest office suite app, Pages. There, on its home page, -- in unmistakable applestyle -- was a very spiffy and bright picture of a letter-sized page with an over-sized and radiantly colorful picture of a butterfly, next to which there appeared a four line caption in barely visible Ariel grey. Wow! That's quite a dissertation there.
We clicked away. Obviously Apple knows nothing about writing. You know… that stuff whose boring, colorless graphics consists of the alphabet. Yes, the alphabet, Mother of All Graphics.
So after more clicking we downloaded LIBRE OFFICE, a free, open source, copy-lefted, collaborated, cross-platform, cross-border effort. We like the idea of Anarcho-Coding and fervently hope it succeeds in tumbling the walls of corporate monopoly, exploitation and oppression. But a word processor Libre Office is not.
As with most of the Suite Gang, Libre Office confuses printing with writing and although it offers a cornucopia of neat and nifty stuff for printing, presenting publishing, linking, hypertexting, spread-sheeting, and databasing, it provides nothing for the process of writing -- that is for the process of thinking with the aid of an alphabet. Word Perfect was and remains the only application which understood what would better be called word scratching than word processing.
Here is a draft of Karl Marx's Capital
Here is a draft of Beethoven's Fidelio
Here is the "work console" for Microsoft Office.
We have little hesitation in pronouncing that nothing of profound or lasting value will ever be written on Microsoft Office.
The reason for this is that thought takes place in the brain and writing serves as an act of of instant remembering which both reflects and objectifies our thoughts.
Sometimes thought unfolds laboriously with great eye-furrowing effort in which case the act of writing serves as a form of calculation which allows us to test our own thoughts by following implications and extracting inferences. Other times, writing gushes forth in furious cascades of sentences or half sentences reflecting a rapid almost confused and seamless sequence of concepts called "insight". Writers furiously scribble these insights out, and just as furiously scratch them away when the articulation is not right. It may be that one word triggered the realization that what was being written did not quite correctly reflect what was then and there being understood, but that one word negated the whole sentence of words that flowed from and connected to it. Scratch it all again… replace with…
Word processing programs that tell you (oh miracle of science!) that Shift-Opt-Right Arrow will "delete three words to the right of the cursor" confess in that one boast that they haven't the foggiest notion of what composing is about.
LIBRA OFFICE, we are sorry to say, espouses the Command Console approach to "word processing." The approach is actually made worse by the fact that not only are commands invokable by key or by drop down lists but by point and clicking on various places on the page. In other words, if your hand rests a little too heavily on the mouse while the cursor is nearish the top of the page, the Header Pop Op pops up. If the cursor is elsewhere something else pops up. The result is a bad psychedelic experience or something like training in urban warfare.
Pleasingly enough, however, all this clutter CAN be clicked way, leaving something similar to the Word Perfect "blank page to type on." THAT achieved, all we needed was some very simple basic formatting mostly involving page numbers.
The reason for this is that thought takes place in the brain and writing serves as an act of of instant remembering which both reflects and objectifies our thoughts.
Sometimes thought unfolds laboriously with great eye-furrowing effort in which case the act of writing serves as a form of calculation which allows us to test our own thoughts by following implications and extracting inferences. Other times, writing gushes forth in furious cascades of sentences or half sentences reflecting a rapid almost confused and seamless sequence of concepts called "insight". Writers furiously scribble these insights out, and just as furiously scratch them away when the articulation is not right. It may be that one word triggered the realization that what was being written did not quite correctly reflect what was then and there being understood, but that one word negated the whole sentence of words that flowed from and connected to it. Scratch it all again… replace with…
Word processing programs that tell you (oh miracle of science!) that Shift-Opt-Right Arrow will "delete three words to the right of the cursor" confess in that one boast that they haven't the foggiest notion of what composing is about.
LIBRA OFFICE, we are sorry to say, espouses the Command Console approach to "word processing." The approach is actually made worse by the fact that not only are commands invokable by key or by drop down lists but by point and clicking on various places on the page. In other words, if your hand rests a little too heavily on the mouse while the cursor is nearish the top of the page, the Header Pop Op pops up. If the cursor is elsewhere something else pops up. The result is a bad psychedelic experience or something like training in urban warfare.
Pleasingly enough, however, all this clutter CAN be clicked way, leaving something similar to the Word Perfect "blank page to type on." THAT achieved, all we needed was some very simple basic formatting mostly involving page numbers.
"Omnes relinquite spes, o vos intrantes
The instructions on Inserting Page Numbers began:
To Insert Page Numbers
Choose Insert - Fields - Page Number to insert a page number at the current cursor position.If you see the text "Page number" instead of the number, choose View - Field names. However, these fields will change position when you add or remove text. So it is best to insert the page number field into a header or footer that has the same position and that is repeated on every page.
Choose Insert - Header - (name of page style) or Insert - Footer - (name of page style) to add a header or footer to all pages with the current page style
If you would like to define a different format or modify the page number, insert a field with Insert - Fields - Other and make the desired settings in the Fields dialog. It is also possible to edit a field inserted with the Page Numbers command with Edit - Fields. To change page numbers, read the Page Numbers guide.
To Start With a Defined Page Number
Now you want some more control on page numbers. You are writing a text document that should start with page number 12.
1. Click into the first paragraph of your document.
2. Choose Format - Paragraph - Text flow.
3. In the Breaks area, enable Insert. Enable With Page Style just to be able to set the new
Pagenumber. Click OK.
4. The new page number is an attribute of the first paragraph of the page.
Who the hell formats this way? We are fairly confident that perhaps .0001% of the population insert page numbers into the first (or even subsequent) paragraphs of text on a page, and that .0001% is locked away in lunatic asylums.
Most people place a page number at either the left, right or center of the top or bottom margins of the page. When the designers of a program start talking about floating page numbers, that does not bode well for the future.
After several hours of wracking our brain over not very comprehensible instructions and following those instructions to the "T" but to no satisfactory result in real-click time, we finally managed to get a footer to work so as to place 1, 2, 3 . . . at the bottom of the first, second and third pages.
But that was only the first circle of hell. We needed to format Table of Contents which could be any number of pages in length and which needed to be numbered with Roman lower case numerals as in i, ii, iii . . .
A day (sic) later we had managed to build a document which contained whatever controls were needed to allow for x numbers of roman numeral pages followed by y number of Arabic numbered pages.
Two days later, we are still trying to figure out how to add a no-number title page to the whole shebang. One would think that creating a title page and then importing the roman/arabic number file (or "template") would do the trick so as to create another Grand Composite Template consisting of Title Page, Table of Contents pages and Text Content pages. But nooooooo….. It just doesn't work. The numbers either go all roman or all arabic or disappear altogether.
During our experimenting we tried to delete a page. We could not find an instructions on how to do this, and whenever we blocked a page, the "cut" symbol on the menu bar became inactive. We finally figured out (by mere accident mind you) that the way to delete a page is to place the cursor at the lower right and scroll up and back and then hit "cut".
We fear that at this point it would be easier to install DOS in emulation and run Word Perfect on that basis.'
We have no objection to creating a "suite" which enables people to paste pretty pictures of butterflies, to build colorful graphs and pie charts, to repeat a lexicon of prefabbed burbles, to create vast libraries of so-called templates and styles and automatically control such tasks as creating an outline in the mind taxing format of I, A, 1. a. (1) (a) . . . But we wish that there would be an option to : dispense with all that other shit and allow simple basic line spacing, centering, indenting, footnoting and page numbering. The trick is, Oh ye Techies, it is not complicated and requires no wizmography.
©WCG 2014
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