It should have be done in a scripting language (like, say, LISTDB MEMO)
from which you can generate all the formats you want from plain text to
fancy printout. However, secretaries and technical writers tend to have
no idea how one would use SCRIPT or equivalent. Several years ago we
decided that we needed a standard format for documentation work so that
we didn't end up with a big mess with everyone using a different program
and only knowing this particular program, and we chose Word for the
obvious reasons. It is EXTREMELY DIFFICULT to get decent ASCII output out
of Word, to the point that I spent several days writing a program to do
this the second time I had to convert a large Word document to plain
text. The program is a kludge based on my typographic conventions but it
took less time to write it than it would have taken to do it manually.
Eric