Escape from Microsoft Word

You have to hand it to an article which manages to bring Ancient Greek philosophy to bear on why MSWord is both simultaneously high-powered and utterly useless for productive, creative work, while providing practical help on some if its most intractable problems. "Word, it seems, obeys the following rule: when a “style” is applied to text that is more than 50 percent “direct-formatted” (like the italics I applied to the magazine titles), then the “style” removes the direct formatting. So The New York Review of Books (with the three-letter month May) lost its italics. When less than 50 percent of the text is “direct-formatted,” as in the example with The New Yorker (with the nine-letter month September), the direct-formatting is retained. No writer has ever thought about the exact percentage of italics in a line of type, but Word is reduced to this kind of arbitrary principle because its Platonic model—like all Platonic models—is magnificent in its inner coherence but mostly irrelevant to the real world. " - Escape from Microsoft Word by Edward Mendelson | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books