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It's telling that the article doesn't recommend any alternatives. Building an easy-to-use yet flexible WYSIWYG word processor is a huge challenge, and no one ha
by TrevorBurnham 16y ago
It's telling that the article doesn't recommend any alternatives. Building an easy-to-use yet flexible WYSIWYG word processor is a huge challenge, and no one has nailed it yet. I like Apple's Pages, but it's less powerful than Word and still has a steep learning curve. What else is there? Is anyone going to seriously suggest that OpenOffice has a way better UI than Word? Or Google Docs, or Zoho?
It's true that Microsoft isn't innovating in the word processor market. Neither is anyone else.
- tjpick 16y agoI dropped "word processors" long ago, in favour of emacs and latex. Word processors are the slalom of writing.
- wingo 16y ago'No results found for "slalom of writing".' Excellent!
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- solinent 16y agoLyx is definitely a good editor (at least for a subset of the tasks in word).
- jcl 16y agoActually, the article mentions that there is a "mini-industry of Word alternatives for novelists", and it links to an example: http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.html http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.html Presumably this is the kind of program the author is thinking of when he says that Word lacks features that assist composition.
- lallysingh 16y agoEmacs/LaTeX for me as well, but some non-technical friends of mine have had success with Nisus Writer. There is a small market for actually-good word processing systems out there, it's just that Word is (a) usually already there on people's machines and (b) superficially sufficient.
- Qz 16y agoIt's really not superficially sufficient which is the problem. It only seems that way because there's nothing else. IE actually is superficially sufficient, but people still go and get firefox/chrome/whatever. No one gets a word alternative because there aren't any (and I mean alternative in the functional sense, not the free vs proprietary OpenOffice sense).
- qjz 16y agoThe problem is that WYSIWYG is a concept that has almost nothing to do with writing. It's more about typesetting and layout. It's easy to write in a text editor or even this little box on HN. Now try to just write in Word. Wait until you're happy with what you've written before you change the way it looks. Then try to do some editing. Then send it to someone for collaboration. In no time at all, it turns into a big clusterfk. You get people who do things like PUT ALL THEIR CHANGES IN RED BOLD UPPERCASE SO THEY STAND OUT. Gee, thanks a lot. Now I have to completely retype the section in my original font and/or color to get it to look normal again. To make matters worse, there's still an invisible space that's in RED BOLD UPPERCASE, waiting for your cursor like a landmine. Typesetting should be one of the last steps of document preparation, and the majority of writers shouldn't even be involved in that process.
- adamc 16y agoYou don't need to do that. All you need to do is define your styles initially and reapply them as needed.
- Qz 16y agoOne way to go would be to split the text and layout like html/css.
- sesqu 16y agoor TeX
- kragen 16y ago> You get people who do things like PUT ALL THEIR CHANGES IN RED BOLD UPPERCASE SO THEY STAND OUT. If you get someone who doesn't know how to use Word, teach them. Say, "Can you please turn on Track Changes and redo your changes, without the red bold uppercase?" > Typesetting should be one of the last steps of document preparation, and the majority of writers shouldn't even be involved in that process. You get a better product when the writer is aware and competent at that. Maybe you're saying that that's too much to ask from the majority of writers, or maybe that extra increment of quality isn't worth it for the majority of books.