I remember when WordPerfect vs Wordstar was the religious debate in the PC world like vi vs emacs. As Macs brought WYSIWYG and desktop publishing to consumers and small business, things got messy.

Does anybody remember AMI Pro? I think that was where I first started to learn about "paragraph styles" and the disciplined way someone could use these WYSIWYG editors a bit like one can use LaTeX styles. Assign styles abstractly, then be able to change in one place and modify all occurrences throughout a document.

However, this just set me up for decades of frustration as the vast majority of business users cannot be bothered to use any discipline at all. Documents would be littered with overlapping bits of manual formatting that would drive me insane with their impossible interactions. And if they defined paragraph styles, it was as endless litter of new styles so that they were hardly ever reused.

It may be my Wordstar indoctrination coming through, but I think these tools would all be better with explicit markup for boundaries, so you could escape the madness of never being able to predict, "which implied style(s) are going to apply to the next character I type with the current cursor position?"

You can lock down almost all the manual formatting in Word (i.e. allow styles only), and you can make a template out of it too.

I remember a version of WordPerfect on an AT&T Unix workstation someone was selling in the early/mid-90s. I wanted one so bad.