I'm disappointed to see that MS Word has become the default for publishers. Back in 1999 I authored a web programming book for O'Reilly. At the time, their technical folks would begrudgingly accept Word files, but they strongly preferred FrameMaker.[1] Some of that probably had to do with the propensity for large Word files to become corrupted, but it's also because FrameMaker helped authors generate documents with much cleaner styling than Word. It's a shame that Adobe let FrameMaker languish.
FrameMaker allowed you to do ad hoc formatting, but it was designed for a stylesheet approach. The difference is analogous to creating a web page and declaring styles inline (how most folks use Word) vs. using a stylesheet (how most folks used FrameMaker). It is possible to pop open a style inspector in Word and use that instead, but it feels like an afterthought.
Pages also has a style inspector, which is my favorite feature (despite the old-school NeXT-style drawer). For a reason that I can't easily articulate, using styles in Pages feels cleaner than Word and more like using FrameMaker. So if I have to create a large Word document I will typically do so in Pages, then export to Word.
[1] I believe O'Reilly also accepted alternative open source formats such as DocBook and LaTeX. And though these might be great formats, I could never find an editor that I could stand using for more than a few minutes -- let alone the months needed to write a book.
> I'm disappointed to see that MS Word has become the default for publishers. ... FrameMaker allowed you to do ad hoc formatting, but it was designed for a stylesheet approach. ... It is possible to pop open a style inspector in Word and use that instead, but it feels like an afterthought.
How long has it been since you used Word? The styles are now right on the Home tab in the Ribbon. On my monitor, it takes up over half the width of the Ribbon. You don't have to "pop open" anything to use styles, but you do need to open the styles palette to define and change styles.
A publisher could supply a Word template to its authors, and forbid the author to make any other formatting changes. They could also enforce this by opening the styles inspector and checking for any unauthorized formatting.
An author could also apply a different stylesheet to reformat a text to match a different publisher's stylesheet.
Word is a styles-based word processor, internally. If you boldface some text, Word will create a new anonymous style that's simply the existing style, plus boldface. You could even use the styles inspector to change all instances of that anonymous style back to the original style, or to turn it into a named style.
You can use Word like Framemaker (sans frames) if you want. It's just that most people don't.
I still use Word regularly, and yes there are styles in the ribbon, along with a panel which can be opened as well. But the ribbon only shows six styles (until you pop it open), it doesn't do a good job of warning when you have overridden a style, and it confusingly mixes default styles with user-defined styles.
There are a couple other big fundamental differences with how Word supports styles:
1. Copy/paste behavior. If you copy formatted text into a Word document, it brings the styles with it. If you pull a lot of styled content into your document (including HTML), you must constantly work to restyle the imported content. FrameMaker (IIRC) helps you remap the pasted text to existing document styles.
2. Character styles in Word have always seemed like neglected step-children relative to paragraph styles. Both FrameMaker and Pages treat character styles as full peers of paragraph styles and give them separate picker lists.
FrameMaker allowed you to do ad hoc formatting, but it was designed for a stylesheet approach. The difference is analogous to creating a web page and declaring styles inline (how most folks use Word) vs. using a stylesheet (how most folks used FrameMaker). It is possible to pop open a style inspector in Word and use that instead, but it feels like an afterthought.
Pages also has a style inspector, which is my favorite feature (despite the old-school NeXT-style drawer). For a reason that I can't easily articulate, using styles in Pages feels cleaner than Word and more like using FrameMaker. So if I have to create a large Word document I will typically do so in Pages, then export to Word.
[1] I believe O'Reilly also accepted alternative open source formats such as DocBook and LaTeX. And though these might be great formats, I could never find an editor that I could stand using for more than a few minutes -- let alone the months needed to write a book.