Extended RTF Editing Features... a workaround

[wordmuse]

Hi -

I thought I'd throw my two cents (well 10 cents) in too.

First of all, like hoisting, I think, Kinook, you may not realize just how intensely lots of your users would find this beneficial.

Like hoisting, this would improve UR and URP a bajillion percent. Really. And just as I did with my short list of what I wanted with hoisting, here's my short list for *internal* rtf capability in UR and URP.

1 - named Styles with a drop down similar to the one you have for fonts. I want to be able to call a style something like boldredyellow, which when applied, gives me bold red text on a yellow background. If I have another style called, perhaps, ocean, then it might have blue italic text on a cyan background. rocky ocean might have bullets, too. I want to name the styles myself in addition to any that UR has natively.

2 - tables - ideally the ability to have nested tables would be good, but I'll settle for flat tables. I want to be able to change the widths of the cells, apply formatting (and styles) inside the tables, set the indents within the cells, and most of the easy stuff I could do with Word 98, never mind Word 2003 and Word 2007.

3 - paragraph level indents - I want to be able to visually offset my text as needed.

4 - numbered bullets

5 - format painter - a godsend master tool

That's my short list. There's a whole lot more I could - and will - ask for as UR continues to evolve. (example: outlining) But I personally would be thrilled as each of these items became implemented in UR.

Jumping out to Word isn't a huge problem for me, though it would be if I were using UR in a production environment, where knocking out content lickity-split was required. It takes about 10 seconds for Word to load and then load my item when I ctrl+j it. And the return trip takes about the same amount of time. Multiply that by the number of times I need to do this (for some, I could imagine it being a very regular task), and this gets old and could potentially impact productivity.

I know that you can't expect every program to meet every need you might have. And I fully accpet that this request might negatively trade off with some other wonderful feature that UR currently supports. For example, I would not give up hoisting just to have a better internal RTF editor. But assuming that I don't have to give up something like that in order to get a better internal RTF editor, I think that Kinook should truly understand the passion of this request by its userbase.

Again - I believe that implementing this would be welcomed with the same enthusiasm that you had when hoisting was implemented. Really.

Regards,
Bal