> Microsoft Word is a tyrant of the imagination, a petty, unimaginative, inconsistent dictator that is ill-suited to any creative writer's use.
Microsoft Word was never designed to be an ideal tool for creative writing, programming, or any such thing. It was designed to help office workers produce business documents (a) quickly, (b) in a format that integrates with all the other programs in the Office suite, and (b) in conformance with whatever formatting and workflow requirements their employer already had in place. Microsoft probably consulted with a bunch of Big Business customers when they designed Office. Yep, the kind of Big Business that uses Java classes like EnterpriseBusinessInterconnectInterfaceFactoryFactoryFactory.
Type a few word, hit "Save", and automatically get reasonable default fonts and margins? Check. Type a few more words, make some typos, have them fixed automatically? Check. Certain words need to be italicized or underlined? Check. Certain words need to be in a different font? Check. Who cares if it's consistent, the boss wants it bold so just make it bold. Indent the first line by X inches, double-space here, single-space there? Check. All accomplished with a few clicks of the mouse. No need to learn any command-line programs, formatting \Syn\{TaX}, or keyboard shortcuts. It's exactly what the majority of office workers need. Bonus points if it also helps clueless parents design their daughter's birthday party flyer in pink and purple Comic Sans, but I don't think MS really cares because that market is miniscule compared to Big Business.
> I hate Microsoft Word the way Winston Smith hated Big Brother.
At the end of that novel, <SPOILER> Winston loved Big Brother. </SPOILER> Because he probably realized that no other program but Big Biz MS Word would fit the use cases that it was designed for. LibreOffice? Call me again when it gets the Review function right. Your average college professor isn't going to learn how to use a version control system to suggest changes to his student's thesis-in-progress.
> Your average college professor isn't going to learn how to use a version control system to suggest changes to his student's thesis-in-progress.
Word has version control though, and it's appreciated by many in academia. Version control for humans is a Big Startup Idea, I wouldn't be surprised if Dropbox and Github were trying to tackle it (from 2 different angles: Dropbox from the "how do we get average the user to get features for nerds", and Github from the "how do we get the average non-nerd to use us")
>At the end of that novel, <SPOILER> Winston loved Big Brother. </SPOILER> Because he probably realized that no other program
Mostly because he was drugged, physically and psychologically tortured and reduced to his basic instinct and given option to experience its greatest fear or 'love' Big Brother. That's closer to real world than it being the only good option. LibreOffice needs a good compare function, not the whole review shtick.
> Microsoft probably consulted with a bunch of Big Business customers when they designed Office. Yep, the kind of Big Business that uses Java classes like EnterpriseBusinessInterconnectInterfaceFactoryFactoryFactory.
Basically, you pulled this out of your butt because it hit the right notes and because it fit the preconceived notions of the readership of HN. WYSIWYG word processing was actually pioneered at Xerox PARC and MS Word has a direct lineage from there. Fitting the office correspondence conventions of the time was the obvious place to start. In a world that still operates off of paper, this is what makes sense at first.
Java classes like EnterpriseBusinessInterconnectInterfaceFactoryFactoryFactory are a direct result of the deliberate crippling of the Smalltalk runtime model that Java was based on. The very small and minimalist Smalltalk runtime model was another product of Xerox PARC, BTW.
Back in the day, even Java was one of these subversive back-door hacker/engineer things management wasn't hip enough to be a part of. (Unless you were one of the even hipper folks into Smalltalk, Dylan, Common Lisp, Eiffel, Tcl/Tk, Perl, Python, what have you, in which case, you knew better than to fall for Java.)
Heck even SQL, Fortran, and COBOL were the new hip thing back in the day. (Even if that came with corporate backing.)
Microsoft Word was never designed to be an ideal tool for creative writing, programming, or any such thing.
Then indeed, its influence over those fields should be allowed to wane.
LibreOffice? Call me again when it gets the Review function right.
I was required to use the Review feature as a sort of half-assed collaborative editing system for tech specs on a couple of projects around 2008-2010. I found it to be a buggy, work-destroying trap of a feature. Things would actually have gone more smoothly for my project Microsoft had never implemented this feature.
I haven't tried any similar features in LibreOffice. If it doesn't do anything totally crazy (like randomly duplicating blocks of text in odd places) it's probably better.
I read an interview with some high-muckety-muck in the MS Office group years ago. He actually said, in response to a question about features vs. bug fixes, that he was sure users preferred new features to bug fixes for old ones. That features got people excited and no one really cared if they lost a little work every few hours.
He didn't say he'd asked any users. He was just sure.
I wish I could link to it, but I don't recall where I read it.
At the end of the book, Winston Smith is brainwashed by a "re-education process" of pervasive intimidation. He is subjected to the persistent threat of a death sentence, and the threat of rats-eating-your-face torture. He's behaviorally lobotomized and broken by coercive psychological manipulation. ...and oh yeah, they take away his QT 3.14 too.</SPOILER>
Don't bastardize the message and theme of the book.
> Type a few word, hit "Save", and automatically get reasonable default fonts and margins? Check. Type a few more words, make some typos, have them fixed automatically? Check. Certain words need to be italicized or underlined? Check. Certain words need to be in a different font? Check. Who cares if it's consistent, the boss wants it bold so just make it bold. Indent the first line by X inches, double-space here, single-space there? Check. All accomplished with a few clicks of the mouse. No need to learn any command-line programs, formatting \Syn\{TaX}, or keyboard shortcuts. It's exactly what the majority of office workers need.
That's Abiword. A much smaller and cheaper piece of software.
That is all that most office workers need. So why is Office, a huge piece of software the default?
"Call me again when it gets the Review function right. Your average college professor isn't going to learn how to use a version control system to suggest changes to his student's thesis-in-progress."
I suspect this is the ultimate longevity of Word. Retraining is a real pain. So the only way to kill Word is by a thousand cuts. One of those cuts seems to be Google's documents. A number of non-technical folks can now send me a document in Google Docs so I don't have to switch from my Linux desktop to something else to access it, and Google has done a reasonable job of auto importing Word.
So domain specific solutions, with "good enough" import/export may be the solution.
The problem is that Publishers still tend to recruit Oxbridge first eng lit grads whose computer knowledge is probably about the same as Jenn from the IT Crowd.
Unfortunately as Publishing is now having to deal with online and electronic it means they are not best placed to deal with the changes.
And book publishers have sclerotic processes (makes teh Laudry service seem slick and efficient) to take a book from delivery to publication and extra month or so playing with word is't going to make much difference
I just finished writing a lengthy grant application where the humanities professor used Word and I used LibreOffice. We used the review functionality and I didn't even know there was supposed to be a problem. Though, I don't really do more than touch the surface with word processor programs because I don't personally like them very much.
>Microsoft Word was never designed to be an ideal tool for creative writing, programming, or any such thing.
He pointed that out. And he pointed out that the industry was still foisting it on him. That is why he wants it to die. This was the summary at the end of the article in fact.
I'm surprised nobody mentioned Pages on a Mac. It's a style sheet-based tool, where the styles are quite easy to work with.
I've been using it for years now and it does almost everything I need it to do. I realize there are people who absolutely need every little feature in Word, but for things like letters, technical reports, briefs or software documentation Pages works just fine, and produces nicely-formatted documents. You need to ignore the Apple marketing, for some reason they think Pages and Numbers are used exclusively in a home setting for producing toy documents.
I just wish Apple devoted more time to Pages and Numbers, because the tools become annoyingly slow with larger documents (larger meaning a 60-page report with tables). I'd much rather see the existing tools optimized and working fast than new features.
And yes, I know this is not a perfect solution. I just think it's better than Word. But I will also point out that LaTeX (or plain TeX) isn't a good solution either. For people who don't know it well, it doesn't produce the results they want. And for those experienced with it, it becomes an unbelievable time-waster because you spend inordinate amounts of time tweaking things for no good reason.
The truly irreplaceable product is Excel. It is fraught with quirky bugs and limitations and odd conventions (how many people actually end up storing dates before the magic February 29 1900?), yet no alternative can hold a candle to Excel. On the other hand, there are solid alternatives to the other products in the office suite
> Arguments raged internally: should it use control codes, or hierarchical style sheets? In the end, the decree went out: Word should implement both formatting paradigms. Even though they're fundamentally incompatible and you can get into a horrible mess by applying simple character formatting to a style-driven document, or vice versa. Word was in fact broken by design, from the outset -- and it only got worse from there.
Replace "Word" with "HTML". Now is it still the abominable dichotomy the OP is claiming?
Although I think Word sucks in many ways, letting users combine style sheet and local formatting doesn't seem like the Original Sin from which all evil flowed.
"The .doc file format was also obfuscated,... it was effectively a dump of the in-memory data structures .... It's hard to imagine a corporation as large and [usually] competently-managed as Microsoft making such a mistake by accident "
They didn't use a binary on-disk format by accident, nor was it a mistake. The folks who wrote word knew that what users would want to open and save files as fast as possible, on hardware thats weak and tiny by today's standards. Going for a format that resulted in the smallest possible files and the fastest possible reads and writes makes sense in those conditions.
Indeed, disk transfer speed mattered a great deal in the early days. People used to save all their data to floppy disks, and use their hard disks only to load programs.
Say you had a large document of 600 KB size. Floppy drives wrote at 45 KB/second. Imagine waiting 13 seconds for your file to save out. You might save less often -- which means that you ran a correspondingly higher risk of losing data.
The .DOC file is a binary format so that it could contain document "sections," with pointers between the sections. This is what made "Fast Save" possible. If you only made a small change to an enormous document, Word would simply append the changes, and then change the pointers in the rest of the document.
Instead of waiting 13 seconds, you'd get the save in under a second.
Word is IMO just fine for most uses. It has lots of features and lots of ways of writing and designing documents because users wanted them. You can't blame a product on its users.
And note the 'IMO' bit: Why on earth do people think that because they don't like a piece of software, they want to force all the other happy users to stop using it. It's just selfishness and self-importance. The world won't just use the pieces of software that you want, you are going to have to live with other people's choices.
> The world won't just use the pieces of software that you want, you are going to have to live with other people's choices.
Choice- singular. The real problem with Word, as highlighted in OP's post, is its longstanding market dominance & attitude of outright hostility towards interoperability.
I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of writers were less technically savvy, happiest writing in Word, or simply wouldn't know how to write in any other format. It makes sense from the publishers point of view to pick one format and stick with it, so they have a consistent editing style and ability, and only have to deal with converting one format into a final publication.
I do feel that this is one of those cases where you should be able to write in the way you feel best for you, and if the publisher insist on having the final document in a word format, it should be straightforward to convert your chosen representation to theirs. It's hard to say without knowing precisely how the publisher expects the file to be formatted, but if it's fairly straightforward, there are libraries that will write to doc files for you, or there are open formats that MS Word already knows how to convert into .doc files that you could target instead.
Arguing this is the exceptional case misses his point, I think.
He is intelligent, eloquent, and absolutely correct.
In _any_ field except "business letters and reports" there are numerous talented, creative people who use other software and understand his lament: "the major publishers have been browbeaten into believing that Word is the sine qua non of document production systems."
Some examples:
∙ Hard science research are the poster child where "Word slave labor" happens daily
∙ Math research, fortunately there's a lot the web can do but still the Word drudgery
∙ Engineering research
∙ Self-published and indie writers (Scrivener definitely has made a splash)
∙ Law
Who cares? Well, if you want to make a lot of money, these people would throw their money at you if you could ease their pain a little bit.
The publishers get a lot of bad press for other things they do (like Aaron Schwartz), but they're still wrong about MS Word being a publishing platform.
Many authors do already do this. I'm not sure if Charles Stross is complaining about having to write in Word, or simply use a workflow where Word is the end output for the author. The latter makes more sense as a complaint than the former, because I know many published authors (writing runs in the family) who use tools like Scrivener to write and then send it on to their agents / publishers as an exported .doc without any problems.
It could be worse, at least he's not writing scripts (which generally mandate you to use Final Draft)...
> It makes sense from the publishers point of view to pick one format and stick with it, so they have a consistent editing style [...]
One problem with Word is exactly that it is very difficult to get anything remotely consistent out of it. Even people who are very knowledgeable and smart are unable to use that hodgepodge of completely intransparent styling features correctly. Anything involving numbering and bullets tends to be broken as well.
There's no way a publisher gets a consistently styled document from an author. I don't believe that for a second. I'm absolutely certain that publishers have an army of interns who fix the jumbled mess they're receiving from authors.
Monopoly or not, it's the only wsywyg text editor I've ever found truly usable. I now prefer Google docs for convenience but it's not quite there yet for composition/edit experience. Hoping for more good alternatives, if anyone has suggestions.
It depends on what you need. I just use a text editor for a lot of purposes. For writing a long complex document, I really like Scrivener on the Mac--but that's mostly for creating content prior to entering into a formatting/publishing phase. For creating a typical 1-10 page formatted document, Word is fine. But show is Libre Office for the most part.
I'm not sure it is still a problem nowadays but until some months ago if you used the zoom function of the browser Google docs had very bad problems rendering and managing your input.
Long have I said, " Word processors are to words as food processors are to food,"
The root of the trouble is that word processors intermingle the tasks of writing and the task of formatting. This might be fine for the odd office memo, but is ill suited to almost anything else.
That said, word processors are nothing compared to the hell that is writing comments on a touch screen with a predictive text algorithm that refuses to swear!
> The root of the trouble is that word processors intermingle the tasks of writing and the task of formatting.
I completely agree. Software developers and even physical product developers have (or attempt to have) development workflows that separate the content creation from the style.
There is a good reason for that: it is far easier to focus on these things separately than all at once.
You would think Word and other tools for writers would adopt the same ideas in an effort to make their users more productive.
I didn't really appreciated MS Word until I started using Apple Pages: Pages has no draft mode! Suddenly clunky Word seemed to have a better interface. The problem is that over the years Word has become a poster child for feature creep, but that said for each feature that you detest there is someone else who is fan.
I still have Word 2003 (and Excel 2003) installed on my PC, still very useful when I need it, and it is still my first choice when I need to prepare some serious documents, otherwise, I will use Google Docs. It is quite amazing as they are software written 10 years ago, providing all the features I need as of today.
In general, for office suite, I still can't find any opensource alternatives that can compare with these 10 years old software. Yes, they are proprietary, they are not open, blah blah blah, but when you have used other latest alternatives like LibreOffice (Mac), they even can't make the basic Cmd+F search work as expected [1], can you tolerate? This is the question you need to ask.
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've yet to encounter a better method of tracking changes than the one Word uses. Makes it trivially easy for me to take a document, make a bunch of changes, and then have the originator see exactly what I've done to it.
I've found a better method to be creating documents in plain text with some suitable formatting markup, and then apply a diff tool such as meld to see changes made. The way word does it, if I recall, involves sort of mashing the two versions together (or rather, having the change data saved with the document), with red font and strikethrough and so forth used to indicate changes, which is far harder to follow than what meld presents (the two documents side-by-side with coloured sections indicates changes, additions and deletions, joined with little lines between the documents to show locations, and a sensible scrolling mechanism to keep them coordinated).
I haven't used word for a few years, though, so if it's changed, disregard :)
This is an interesting article and has generated some good discussion, but blaming Word for mixing style sheets and control codes seems off to me.
> Arguments raged internally: should it use control codes, or hierarchical style sheets? In the end, the decree went out: Word should implement both formatting paradigms. Even though they're fundamentally incompatible and you can get into a horrible mess by applying simple character formatting to a style-driven document, or vice versa. Word was in fact broken by design, from the outset -- and it only got worse from there.
Back in the 80s and early 90s, WordPerfect was the market leader - not MS Word. And WordPerfect 5.0 supported style sheets when it was released in the 80s, alongside the existing control codes that were already a core feature of WP.[1] Even after it supported WYSIWYG editing, WP still enabled users to Reveal Codes - essentially toggling from WYSIWYG to the underlying markup.
I'm not defending MS Word as a program - I hate it too. I wish WordPerfect or something better had won. But I don't see how Microsoft alone can be blamed for deciding to support both control codes and style sheets.
Word's roots reach back to an era when the primary way to share documents was by printing them out. And that heritage is deeply ingrained in so much of it. But that's not the way documents are shared today. I'd be surprised if even 1% of all documents created in Word in 2013 are printed out, yet all of those optimizations and compromises are still there. Unfortunately, not many people have come up with unambiguously superior replacements, yet, so Word continues to hold on to its position of dominance.
Right now the word processor choices are Word or open-source Word clone, so I don't see the point for the end user. I use Libre/NeoOffice, but it's no easier to use than Word. I'd like to see a word processor more like old ClarisWorks/AppleWorks.
Or you could just use LaTeX with the text editor of your choice. Yes, you can write letters in LaTeX, yes, that is easy and yes, it takes me roughly one minute to get a perfectly-formatted simple letter, which is roughly equivalent to the time it took Word to start the last time I tried it (~2008?)
Wordperfect?
Depends on what you're trying to do.
Writeroom/Darkroom and clones.
Pages.
Scrivener.
Final Draft.
Celtx.
Write (myownapp)
etc.
(no affiliation with any of these)
I agree that trying to force open source alternatives on your workflow after using Microsoft Office for a long time can be difficult. I tried to switch from Microsoft Office to the other open source alternatives and while I did like Open Office, I found I couldn't use it beyond 'average' tasks. As soon as I needed advanced analysis I had to go back to Excel. I find that switching between R and Excel 2013 works well for me. Also I feel that Microsoft has done a good job with Office 2013 and I like what they've done with PowerPoint animations on the ribbon. Frankly though Office is expensive so if you need the features not available in open source alternatives you've just got to pay.
I agree with the article in general, but this isn't true: "Each new version of Word defaulted to writing a new format of file which could not be parsed by older copies of the program."
The first part of the sentence is true, and the second part, "which could not be parsed" is also technically true, but false in practice, since Microsoft releases free tools to convert new formats into old formats.
I use Word 2000 on Win XP to exchange documents with my clients and it's fine, really; they can read what I send them, they send me back .docx files and I edit them without a problem.
(Not to say that MS Word is not horrible; it is, but the particular problem of file formats isn't real).
" Word is, I’m told, horrid, but it talks to publishers, which is really all I use it for." [1]
It is the lock-in. We can use our preferred tools (vim/LaTeX or Gedit/markdown) but collaboration requires capitulation. I can get away with PDFs a lot as I work as a teacher and my work is consumed on paper in very small editions.
[+] [-] kijin|12 years ago|reply
Microsoft Word was never designed to be an ideal tool for creative writing, programming, or any such thing. It was designed to help office workers produce business documents (a) quickly, (b) in a format that integrates with all the other programs in the Office suite, and (b) in conformance with whatever formatting and workflow requirements their employer already had in place. Microsoft probably consulted with a bunch of Big Business customers when they designed Office. Yep, the kind of Big Business that uses Java classes like EnterpriseBusinessInterconnectInterfaceFactoryFactoryFactory.
Type a few word, hit "Save", and automatically get reasonable default fonts and margins? Check. Type a few more words, make some typos, have them fixed automatically? Check. Certain words need to be italicized or underlined? Check. Certain words need to be in a different font? Check. Who cares if it's consistent, the boss wants it bold so just make it bold. Indent the first line by X inches, double-space here, single-space there? Check. All accomplished with a few clicks of the mouse. No need to learn any command-line programs, formatting \Syn\{TaX}, or keyboard shortcuts. It's exactly what the majority of office workers need. Bonus points if it also helps clueless parents design their daughter's birthday party flyer in pink and purple Comic Sans, but I don't think MS really cares because that market is miniscule compared to Big Business.
> I hate Microsoft Word the way Winston Smith hated Big Brother.
At the end of that novel, <SPOILER> Winston loved Big Brother. </SPOILER> Because he probably realized that no other program but Big Biz MS Word would fit the use cases that it was designed for. LibreOffice? Call me again when it gets the Review function right. Your average college professor isn't going to learn how to use a version control system to suggest changes to his student's thesis-in-progress.
[+] [-] GuiA|12 years ago|reply
Word has version control though, and it's appreciated by many in academia. Version control for humans is a Big Startup Idea, I wouldn't be surprised if Dropbox and Github were trying to tackle it (from 2 different angles: Dropbox from the "how do we get average the user to get features for nerds", and Github from the "how do we get the average non-nerd to use us")
[+] [-] Ygg2|12 years ago|reply
Mostly because he was drugged, physically and psychologically tortured and reduced to his basic instinct and given option to experience its greatest fear or 'love' Big Brother. That's closer to real world than it being the only good option. LibreOffice needs a good compare function, not the whole review shtick.
[+] [-] stcredzero|12 years ago|reply
Basically, you pulled this out of your butt because it hit the right notes and because it fit the preconceived notions of the readership of HN. WYSIWYG word processing was actually pioneered at Xerox PARC and MS Word has a direct lineage from there. Fitting the office correspondence conventions of the time was the obvious place to start. In a world that still operates off of paper, this is what makes sense at first.
Java classes like EnterpriseBusinessInterconnectInterfaceFactoryFactoryFactory are a direct result of the deliberate crippling of the Smalltalk runtime model that Java was based on. The very small and minimalist Smalltalk runtime model was another product of Xerox PARC, BTW.
Back in the day, even Java was one of these subversive back-door hacker/engineer things management wasn't hip enough to be a part of. (Unless you were one of the even hipper folks into Smalltalk, Dylan, Common Lisp, Eiffel, Tcl/Tk, Perl, Python, what have you, in which case, you knew better than to fall for Java.)
Heck even SQL, Fortran, and COBOL were the new hip thing back in the day. (Even if that came with corporate backing.)
[+] [-] Lagged2Death|12 years ago|reply
Then indeed, its influence over those fields should be allowed to wane.
LibreOffice? Call me again when it gets the Review function right.
I was required to use the Review feature as a sort of half-assed collaborative editing system for tech specs on a couple of projects around 2008-2010. I found it to be a buggy, work-destroying trap of a feature. Things would actually have gone more smoothly for my project Microsoft had never implemented this feature.
I haven't tried any similar features in LibreOffice. If it doesn't do anything totally crazy (like randomly duplicating blocks of text in odd places) it's probably better.
I read an interview with some high-muckety-muck in the MS Office group years ago. He actually said, in response to a question about features vs. bug fixes, that he was sure users preferred new features to bug fixes for old ones. That features got people excited and no one really cared if they lost a little work every few hours.
He didn't say he'd asked any users. He was just sure.
I wish I could link to it, but I don't recall where I read it.
[+] [-] WinstonOrwell|12 years ago|reply
Don't bastardize the message and theme of the book.
[+] [-] DanBC|12 years ago|reply
That's Abiword. A much smaller and cheaper piece of software.
That is all that most office workers need. So why is Office, a huge piece of software the default?
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|12 years ago|reply
I suspect this is the ultimate longevity of Word. Retraining is a real pain. So the only way to kill Word is by a thousand cuts. One of those cuts seems to be Google's documents. A number of non-technical folks can now send me a document in Google Docs so I don't have to switch from my Linux desktop to something else to access it, and Google has done a reasonable job of auto importing Word.
So domain specific solutions, with "good enough" import/export may be the solution.
[+] [-] walshemj|12 years ago|reply
Unfortunately as Publishing is now having to deal with online and electronic it means they are not best placed to deal with the changes.
And book publishers have sclerotic processes (makes teh Laudry service seem slick and efficient) to take a book from delivery to publication and extra month or so playing with word is't going to make much difference
[+] [-] wfunction|12 years ago|reply
And that's why they released a "Home and Student Edition".
[+] [-] mathnode|12 years ago|reply
Confluence? Twiki? Or equal such centralised documentaiotn and revision service, be it SaaS or locally hosted, Yes.
[+] [-] sinkasapa|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asdasf|12 years ago|reply
He pointed that out. And he pointed out that the industry was still foisting it on him. That is why he wants it to die. This was the summary at the end of the article in fact.
[+] [-] jwr|12 years ago|reply
I've been using it for years now and it does almost everything I need it to do. I realize there are people who absolutely need every little feature in Word, but for things like letters, technical reports, briefs or software documentation Pages works just fine, and produces nicely-formatted documents. You need to ignore the Apple marketing, for some reason they think Pages and Numbers are used exclusively in a home setting for producing toy documents.
I just wish Apple devoted more time to Pages and Numbers, because the tools become annoyingly slow with larger documents (larger meaning a 60-page report with tables). I'd much rather see the existing tools optimized and working fast than new features.
And yes, I know this is not a perfect solution. I just think it's better than Word. But I will also point out that LaTeX (or plain TeX) isn't a good solution either. For people who don't know it well, it doesn't produce the results they want. And for those experienced with it, it becomes an unbelievable time-waster because you spend inordinate amounts of time tweaking things for no good reason.
[+] [-] nonchalance|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 6cxs2hd6|12 years ago|reply
Replace "Word" with "HTML". Now is it still the abominable dichotomy the OP is claiming?
Although I think Word sucks in many ways, letting users combine style sheet and local formatting doesn't seem like the Original Sin from which all evil flowed.
[+] [-] psn|12 years ago|reply
They didn't use a binary on-disk format by accident, nor was it a mistake. The folks who wrote word knew that what users would want to open and save files as fast as possible, on hardware thats weak and tiny by today's standards. Going for a format that resulted in the smallest possible files and the fastest possible reads and writes makes sense in those conditions.
[+] [-] tanzam75|12 years ago|reply
Say you had a large document of 600 KB size. Floppy drives wrote at 45 KB/second. Imagine waiting 13 seconds for your file to save out. You might save less often -- which means that you ran a correspondingly higher risk of losing data.
The .DOC file is a binary format so that it could contain document "sections," with pointers between the sections. This is what made "Fast Save" possible. If you only made a small change to an enormous document, Word would simply append the changes, and then change the pointers in the rest of the document.
Instead of waiting 13 seconds, you'd get the save in under a second.
[+] [-] joosters|12 years ago|reply
And note the 'IMO' bit: Why on earth do people think that because they don't like a piece of software, they want to force all the other happy users to stop using it. It's just selfishness and self-importance. The world won't just use the pieces of software that you want, you are going to have to live with other people's choices.
[+] [-] thuuuomas|12 years ago|reply
Choice- singular. The real problem with Word, as highlighted in OP's post, is its longstanding market dominance & attitude of outright hostility towards interoperability.
[+] [-] GhotiFish|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zerovox|12 years ago|reply
I do feel that this is one of those cases where you should be able to write in the way you feel best for you, and if the publisher insist on having the final document in a word format, it should be straightforward to convert your chosen representation to theirs. It's hard to say without knowing precisely how the publisher expects the file to be formatted, but if it's fairly straightforward, there are libraries that will write to doc files for you, or there are open formats that MS Word already knows how to convert into .doc files that you could target instead.
[+] [-] sounds|12 years ago|reply
He is intelligent, eloquent, and absolutely correct.
In _any_ field except "business letters and reports" there are numerous talented, creative people who use other software and understand his lament: "the major publishers have been browbeaten into believing that Word is the sine qua non of document production systems."
Some examples:
∙ Hard science research are the poster child where "Word slave labor" happens daily
∙ Math research, fortunately there's a lot the web can do but still the Word drudgery
∙ Engineering research
∙ Self-published and indie writers (Scrivener definitely has made a splash)
∙ Law
Who cares? Well, if you want to make a lot of money, these people would throw their money at you if you could ease their pain a little bit.
The publishers get a lot of bad press for other things they do (like Aaron Schwartz), but they're still wrong about MS Word being a publishing platform.
[+] [-] objclxt|12 years ago|reply
It could be worse, at least he's not writing scripts (which generally mandate you to use Final Draft)...
[+] [-] fauigerzigerk|12 years ago|reply
One problem with Word is exactly that it is very difficult to get anything remotely consistent out of it. Even people who are very knowledgeable and smart are unable to use that hodgepodge of completely intransparent styling features correctly. Anything involving numbering and bullets tends to be broken as well.
There's no way a publisher gets a consistently styled document from an author. I don't believe that for a second. I'm absolutely certain that publishers have an army of interns who fix the jumbled mess they're receiving from authors.
[+] [-] redthrowaway|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raverbashing|12 years ago|reply
No. That's the "developers" point of view (and a false dichotomy)
Word is focused on the user. If the user wants to italicise one letter, it's OK to let him do it. Sometimes it's a requirement
Of course, the problem with Word is that you can't debug the mess it creates when it doesn't work the way you wanted.
[+] [-] Dylan16807|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dkuebric|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] telephonetemp|12 years ago|reply
Edit: Why the downvote?
[+] [-] ghaff|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Ecio78|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] e12e|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikro2nd|12 years ago|reply
The root of the trouble is that word processors intermingle the tasks of writing and the task of formatting. This might be fine for the odd office memo, but is ill suited to almost anything else.
That said, word processors are nothing compared to the hell that is writing comments on a touch screen with a predictive text algorithm that refuses to swear!
[+] [-] teleclimber|12 years ago|reply
I completely agree. Software developers and even physical product developers have (or attempt to have) development workflows that separate the content creation from the style.
There is a good reason for that: it is far easier to focus on these things separately than all at once.
You would think Word and other tools for writers would adopt the same ideas in an effort to make their users more productive.
[+] [-] michaelpinto|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tszming|12 years ago|reply
In general, for office suite, I still can't find any opensource alternatives that can compare with these 10 years old software. Yes, they are proprietary, they are not open, blah blah blah, but when you have used other latest alternatives like LibreOffice (Mac), they even can't make the basic Cmd+F search work as expected [1], can you tolerate? This is the question you need to ask.
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=49853
[+] [-] skue|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] AndrewDucker|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EliRivers|12 years ago|reply
I haven't used word for a few years, though, so if it's changed, disregard :)
[+] [-] skue|12 years ago|reply
> Arguments raged internally: should it use control codes, or hierarchical style sheets? In the end, the decree went out: Word should implement both formatting paradigms. Even though they're fundamentally incompatible and you can get into a horrible mess by applying simple character formatting to a style-driven document, or vice versa. Word was in fact broken by design, from the outset -- and it only got worse from there.
Back in the 80s and early 90s, WordPerfect was the market leader - not MS Word. And WordPerfect 5.0 supported style sheets when it was released in the 80s, alongside the existing control codes that were already a core feature of WP.[1] Even after it supported WYSIWYG editing, WP still enabled users to Reveal Codes - essentially toggling from WYSIWYG to the underlying markup.
I'm not defending MS Word as a program - I hate it too. I wish WordPerfect or something better had won. But I don't see how Microsoft alone can be blamed for deciding to support both control codes and style sheets.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect#Styles_and_style_li...
[+] [-] InclinedPlane|12 years ago|reply
Word's roots reach back to an era when the primary way to share documents was by printing them out. And that heritage is deeply ingrained in so much of it. But that's not the way documents are shared today. I'd be surprised if even 1% of all documents created in Word in 2013 are printed out, yet all of those optimizations and compromises are still there. Unfortunately, not many people have come up with unambiguously superior replacements, yet, so Word continues to hold on to its position of dominance.
[+] [-] hydralist|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oinksoft|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] claudius|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pseingatl|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] willvarfar|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] icu|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bambax|12 years ago|reply
The first part of the sentence is true, and the second part, "which could not be parsed" is also technically true, but false in practice, since Microsoft releases free tools to convert new formats into old formats.
I use Word 2000 on Win XP to exchange documents with my clients and it's fine, really; they can read what I send them, they send me back .docx files and I edit them without a problem.
(Not to say that MS Word is not horrible; it is, but the particular problem of file formats isn't real).
[+] [-] keithpeter|12 years ago|reply
It is the lock-in. We can use our preferred tools (vim/LaTeX or Gedit/markdown) but collaboration requires capitulation. I can get away with PDFs a lot as I work as a teacher and my work is consumed on paper in very small editions.
[1] http://william.gibson.usesthis.com/