4 ms·

> The lingua franca for most writing is Microsoft Word so you’ll have to buy that eventually... I don't understand why something as ubiquitous as writing neces

by valine 10y ago

> The lingua franca for most writing is Microsoft Word so you’ll have to buy that eventually... I don't understand why something as ubiquitous as writing necessitates spending $100 on software from Microsoft. A plain text editor works out of the box. If you have a need for more complex formatting you could use LibreOffice, OpenOffice, Pages (comes free with a new Mac/iPad), WPS Office, etc. I get that Word has is the standard and all, I just don't understand why the agreeded upon standard needs to cost upward of $100, especially for something as simple as word processing.

zhubert 10y ago
It wasn't the formatting actually. Change tracking of the proposed edits from the copyeditor was greatly expedited through Word's toolset. While I could have copied them all over by hand, I figured I'd likely introduce other errors in the process. Clicking accept/reject was worth the peace of mind.
- jessaustin 10y ago
  It's my (possibly false...) impression that those who find Word's "Track Changes" valuable, have never used diff/patch or any of their many descendants (i.e. git etc.) Trying to keep two contributors' work straight with Word's "Track Changes" is a hair-pulling challenge. With more people, forget about it. In large groups, I've found even "change the third sentence in the ninth paragraph" requests via email to be better...
  - zhubert 10y ago
    I can't address the general impression, but as someone who spends nearly every moment of my day in git (and only twenty percent of my day dealing with conflicts, I jest) I think my advice is more towards impedance matching. When working with folks outside of tech, something like Word expedites the process as it's their native tongue. While tools like diff and patch are great (I was a Unix admin at Amazon back in the Jurassic period), they'd limit my options for copy editors.
SwellJoe 10y ago
Technical publishers tend to be much friendlier to alternatives. I delivered my book in OpenOffice format, generated from DocBook XML (translated from DocBook SGML midway through the writing process), to my publisher, and they were comfortable with it and had versions of their templates and such for it, and that was ~14 years ago. I would hope it has improved even more since then. And, I'm glad to hear Word has gotten cheaper. Didn't you used to need to buy the whole Office suite to get it, and wasn't it like $250? I genuinely don't know. The last version of Office I bought was much more than a decade ago. Oh, nevermind. I checked. It's sold as a subscription. Costs $99.99/year, so it is much more expensive than it used to be, it's just spread over several years. It used to be reasonable to keep the same Office version for 5+ years.

by valine 10y ago

zhubert 10y ago

It wasn't the formatting actually. Change tracking of the proposed edits from the copyeditor was greatly expedited through Word's toolset. While I could have copied them all over by hand, I figured I'd likely introduce other errors in the process. Clicking accept/reject was worth the peace of mind.

jessaustin 10y ago
It's my (possibly false...) impression that those who find Word's "Track Changes" valuable, have never used diff/patch or any of their many descendants (i.e. git etc.) Trying to keep two contributors' work straight with Word's "Track Changes" is a hair-pulling challenge. With more people, forget about it. In large groups, I've found even "change the third sentence in the ninth paragraph" requests via email to be better...
- zhubert 10y ago
  I can't address the general impression, but as someone who spends nearly every moment of my day in git (and only twenty percent of my day dealing with conflicts, I jest) I think my advice is more towards impedance matching. When working with folks outside of tech, something like Word expedites the process as it's their native tongue. While tools like diff and patch are great (I was a Unix admin at Amazon back in the Jurassic period), they'd limit my options for copy editors.

SwellJoe 10y ago

Technical publishers tend to be much friendlier to alternatives. I delivered my book in OpenOffice format, generated from DocBook XML (translated from DocBook SGML midway through the writing process), to my publisher, and they were comfortable with it and had versions of their templates and such for it, and that was ~14 years ago. I would hope it has improved even more since then. And, I'm glad to hear Word has gotten cheaper. Didn't you used to need to buy the whole Office suite to get it, and wasn't it like $250? I genuinely don't know. The last version of Office I bought was much more than a decade ago. Oh, nevermind. I checked. It's sold as a subscription. Costs $99.99/year, so it is much more expensive than it used to be, it's just spread over several years. It used to be reasonable to keep the same Office version for 5+ years.