11 ms·

The Future of the Word Processor (2016)

99 points by enkiv2 9y ago

6stringmerc 9y ago
Pretty fun article. I did a major Research Paper on slowing down the English "writing process" on purpose to focus more on fundamentals (grammar, spelling) without the assists of modern technology. Start with quill, eventually get to typewriter. Writing well takes active thought. That's why this quote is, to me, giggle worthy: >"In 15 years I think the input interface and the idea of a 'document' [will] be entirely reimagined," Chen suggests. "I don't think we'll be at telepathy in that timeframe but I can see a lot more speech and audio playing a larger role for input. Video is already augmenting the document, but VR could be ubiquitous by then." Formal writing style - especially in long essays - is quite different than spoken word cadences. Basically my point is people don't customarily speak with the same discipline or rigor that they might put into writing. Tack on the issue, in the US at least, of thick regional accents and I really, really don't see Voice Input being the amazing game changer it can be advertised as from time to time (see: Siri).
- zokier 9y ago
  While I'd concur in your skepticism about voice specifically, I still think documents are becoming increasingly multimedia, with elements such as video, interactive elements, graphs and tables etc, and I feel like traditional word processors, which are the go-to tool for many people for authoring, are woefully inadequate to handle such rich documents.
  - douche 9y ago
    Most of the time, I feel like it would be easier to write HTML markup to style documents than it is to poke and prod at the Word formatting options. In college, when I was routinely having to write papers that needed footnotes and specific formatting styles, I nearly broke down and learned LaTex, I got so frustrated. And, with HTML, it would be trivial to add in the types of multimedia elements you mention. If only I could convince the non-technical people and management on my team to ditch Word docs... If nothing more, it more make version-control merge conflicts so much less painful to deal with.
    - 6stringmerc 9y ago
      SharePoint was a great asset for my proposal team over in Finance for version control issues and Word compatibility. Not a cure-all, but it worked for the non-technical folks well enough (and saved a lot of heart burn).
    - zokier 9y ago
      Do you know any visual (dare I say wysiwyg) HTML authoring tools that adhere and emphasize semantically sensible markup and working efficiently with styles, especially in the context of using some predefined corporate templates? Something that captures the few good bits from Word and applies those to HTML based document model?
    - smacktoward 9y ago
      The funny thing is, what you're dreaming of is basically WordPerfect, the word processor that ruled the world for many years until Word came along and killed it. WordPerfect didn't use HTML for formatting, because HTML hadn't been invented yet. But it did use its own set of formatting tags, which are more or less analogous. And it had a "Reveal Codes" key you could press at any time to show all the formatting tags that were active in the current document, letting you tweak their placement, add new ones by hand, etc. You could always get directly at the logic that was being used to format your document. Word's big selling point was that, being Windows-based, it could abstract all that complexity away and let you format documents entirely visually. And it worked! Or at least, it worked well enough for most people most of the time. But the problem with Word's approach has always been that, when it doesn't work, it can be incredibly frustrating to figure out exactly why. Which was never a problem with WordPerfect, since there was no layer of hidden formatting magic sitting between you and your document.
      - jhbadger 9y ago
        And likewise WordStar, which was the previous standard word processor that WordPerfect displaced, also had visible formatting codes.
    - feeboo 9y ago
      If only we had a decent way to print those html pages to pdf. But It seems like the print-css is kind of neglected. The stuff barely is doing what it should(page-break and friends). Neither can you really use min-height=20mm. A pity. And the nicer pdf creators (weasyprint) don't understand the new css rules like flexbox or grid. So we are still stuck. No easy way to force a footer to the end of a printed page via css.
  - 6stringmerc 9y ago
    Actually I will do my best to agree with you outright on the multimedia front! I'm a huge fan of Medium (70+ pieces on there) because of the freedom to intermingle material with the text. It's quite powerful. However, I use those elements as supplements to the written word, not vice-versa (ex: blog spam / slide shows with large image, little text, big ads)
- bluGill 9y ago
  Some portions of the bible were written by a scribe who took dictation. Sometimes they took the pen to write something important in their own hand, (normally a closing), but most of it was not written this way. Today we consider their writing formal. Was it that way then though? (I've never actually cared enough about the topic to see if history says anything more)
  - douche 9y ago
    The way that the Bible reads today, in English, after countless revisions and reformulations, translations and copyings, is so far removed from the original Greek or Aramaic that it's almost inconceivable that the words on the page are even close to what was written two thousand years ago. The formality of the Bible in English can be in large part attributed to the King James version, and other versions of that time period, where you've got the turmoil of the reformation, with the English King as the head of the Anglican church in opposition to Rome, as well as a relatively tumultuous internal political climate, and so a lot of passages were tweaked around to reinforce royal authority.
    - AnimalMuppet 9y ago
      The manuscript evidence very strongly disagrees with you.
    - Garfgon 9y ago
      Per Wikipedia the different New Testament texts have a 99.5% accuracy with each other, and the oldest existing manuscripts were written ~200 years after the original: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textual_criticism_of_the_New_Testament https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textual_criticism_of_the_New_T.... Modern translations are done based on analysis of the existing Greek manuscripts, not based on the KJV so any political meddling with the KJV doesn't affect the NIV, ESV or similar.
      - Nomentatus 9y ago
        True but unhelpful, since Aramaic had riches and critical distinctions that have been dropped entirely or conflated on the way through low ancient Greek and into older English. For example, four or five different words with quite different meanings have all been rendered as "forgive" or "forgiveness" in the KJV translation making a contradictory and uninformative mess. (Philosophically speaking - it's still great if not entirely comprehensible poetry.) Given how central the Bible was to that concept, the KJV also impoverished our language, setting up an impossible problem for translators and helping to make us all much more ethically moronic than we'd otherwise be.
- Spooky23 9y ago
  Great point. The only people I've seen (and Ive tracked metrics in stuff like this among large user) using dictation beyond texts and short replies are specialists like attorneys and doctors and people in a bind with injuries. Personally, i type faster and more accurately than I talk. The 1960 version of me would probably prefer dictation!
  - 6stringmerc 9y ago
    A friend of mine is an extremely talented developer (between jobs actually) and he loves his tech gear. Specifically smart phone tech. We had a long argument about usefulness, because as a Writer, I carry a small notebook and pen. Our joking back and forth went over stuff like "Battery Life" (Phone has a concern, notebook does not) and "Water Resistance" (neither scores that great), "Cost and Maintenance" and so on and so forth. For my needs - writing notes - the little old school approach won, but it was inferior for his needs.
    - NobleLie 9y ago
      Digital becomes a real boon when you are creating knowledge networks; connecting pieces of information, or tagging them. This metadata is, as far as im aware, best suited for being stored digitally. Disclaimer: I'm working on a knowledge management app thats core focus is connections and tagging (amongst many other useful features)
  - LaikaF 9y ago
    One of the better pieces of advise I got in college was to use dictation to make a rough draft. Basically explain what your topic is about as if you were telling a friend, or get a friend and explain it to them. Then go back and edit.
    - ijidak 9y ago
      Huh. Interesting. I'm going to have to try that. Sometimes the writing process does get in the way, as speech allows for faster changes in thought and direction than writing or typing, I feel. Which makes it good during the brainstorming phase.
- munificent 9y ago
  > Writing well takes active thought. That's why this quote is, to me, giggle worthy Sure, but it's not clear that forcing all of that thought to happen before the first draft actually improves the final result. Many writers feel they need to bang out a shitty first draft and that much of the magic happens in later revisions. > Tack on the issue, in the US at least, of thick regional accents and I really, really don't see Voice Input being the amazing game changer it can be advertised as from time to time I often experience a funny phenomenon. A lot of times when I'm out for a walk or a long drive, I'll start thinking about fiction ideas. Before too long, my wandering mind drills down to what I think is an actual internal monologue of prose. In my head, it flows smoothly and sounds compelling. I always mean to start writing it down when I get home but never seem to find the time or discipline or whatever to do so. Maybe already being in the middle of a 200k-word nonfiction book has something to do with that... What I've always wondered is if I am actually narrating real words or just sort of imagining that I am in that way that it's always easier to imagine a drawing than it is to draw it. The real experiment would be to get a recorder and start dictating, but I never have. If I did, would that work? If so, than it means I might "write" works in this way that for simple practical reasons would never come about at all without the speech recognition. Even if I were to summon the discipline to manually transcribe my inner monologue, would something be lost in the translation? Or gained? Or both?
  - adrianratnapala 9y ago
    I have these monologues too, and they are far better written than anything that comes from my hands. So I am pretty sure I am composing in "mentalese" augmented with just enough English to fool me into thinking I am making good prose. Speaking out loud while thinking is a good exercise, and more difficult than just thinking. But when I do it ends up in a conversational style, as if I was giving an talk to tech colleagues. Also when I am in Germany, I find it very easy to "think in German" even though I can't speak properly.
  - mirimir 9y ago
    When I'm starting a piece, I typically bang out whatever comes to mind. I keep at that for a while, and then rearrange it, as a crude outline. Then I flesh it out. Often, first thing in the day, blocks just come out, as if someone is dictating to me. Sometimes, I wake up seeing printed text. Then I go back and rewrite, and shuffle as needed. I've come to like Geany, because it's simple, but has spell check. I don't have much need for layout, beyond HTML.
- tspike 9y ago
  The best writing I ever did was on an Alphasmart 2000 word processor [0]. I'm way better at getting my thoughts down using a keyboard than pen and paper, but computers are just too distracting. This little thing was perfect. A 4-line black and white LCD screen with save files and no frills. Push the power button and start writing. Use AA batteries that last forever. Practically indestructible - toss it in a backpack and go. [0] http://lowendmac.com/1999/alphasmart-2000-a-different-kind-of-word-processor/ http://lowendmac.com/1999/alphasmart-2000-a-different-kind-o...
- accordionclown 9y ago
  > Formal writing style - especially in long essays - is quite different than spoken word cadences. i think many observers say that reader preferences are trending to a more conversational style these days anyway. and, if you have an iphone, you can use the dictate command on the keyboard to input into the notes app. you need to do a fair bit of editing, it's true, but many first drafts require that anyway. so all in all, i think that dictating your first draft is a pretty smart idea, especially if these conversational flashes happen to you during a walk, and also if you are prone to forgetting them before you get them down. for instance, i dictated the first draft of this comment on my walk just now, and then emailed it to myself to post it here. i cleaned it up, of course, but if you want to see the original, as is, i posted it here: > http://zenmagiclove.com/simple/comment.txt http://zenmagiclove.com/simple/comment.txt
  - emodendroket 9y ago
    > i think many observers say that reader preferences are trending to a more conversational style these days anyway. Even if that is true, actual conversation is full of digressions, half-completed thoughts, repetition, incorrectly chosen words, etc. It's remarkable how incoherent a transcript of speech can look compared to how coherent it sounds listening to it (Donald Trump is a prime example of the phenomenon, as an untrained public speaker).
    - accordionclown 9y ago
      nobody talked about dictating "true, actual conversation". here's what prompted that: > when I'm out for a walk or a long drive, I'll start thinking about fiction ideas. Before too long, my wandering mind drills down to what I think is an actual internal monologue of prose. In my head, it flows smoothly and sounds compelling. I always mean to start writing it down when I get home but never seem to find the time or discipline or whatever to do so.
      - emodendroket 9y ago
        "True" belongs to the phrase "even if that is true."
- ido 9y ago
  I have a friend who is a professional translator and apperantly speech to text is heavily used in that field (and thus translators often benefit from having quite beefy PCs).
  - emodendroket 9y ago
    That seems odd, since translators are usually concerned with written, rather than spoken material (the latter generally being the province of interpreters).
    - ido 9y ago
      Why? She reads the written source material and dictates it to the computer in the target language.
      - emodendroket 9y ago
        Oh. I imagined the source was a recording.
- kakarot 9y ago
  You can't make giant evil genius evidence walls with vocal samples. We will always have use cases that prefer the written word.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  US regional accents are pretty mild compared to what you would see in some other languages (and even to some extent to what you'd see in English in some other places).
- johnchristopher 9y ago
  > Pretty fun article. I did a major Research Paper on slowing down the English "writing process" on purpose to focus more on fundamentals (grammar, spelling) without the assists of modern technology. Start with quill, eventually get to typewriter. But it's only recently (two century or three) that grammar and spelling are the fundamentals.
z1mm32m4n 9y ago
There are a couple things that all these "death to word processors" articles overlook: 1. Stickiness. Google Docs (and even Microsoft Word) work so well when you use them in conjunction with their respective ecosystem. Many users choose Google Docs over Dropbox Paper simply because they already have Google Apps accounts, even though as a product what they really want is something more like Dropbox Paper. Inevitably, what happens is that those who can try out a new product on a small team do so, but those who are forced to work between teams or even between companies choose the solution they're already using; i.e., the stickiest. 2. Plain text is powerful I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir here, but each new "office productivity" or "word processor replacement" tool comes with it's own silo. Even Microsoft Word, which has it's own file type that you can save to your Desktop, is largely a proprietary format. You can export data out of Google Docs or Dropbox Paper, etc., but the idea is that you're leaving the promised land. You're packing up and moving somewhere else. On the other hand, we know from the Unix philosophy that plain text is a universal interface. Using plain text can help us escape these siloes. The problem, of course, is that from grade school we teach students that to edit text we use Microsoft Word. There are a lot of cool new products in this design space of "word processor replacements," but few which tackle these two fundamental issues.
- GnarfGnarf 9y ago
  MS Word exports RTF, which is a pretty powerful plain-text format. Our application generates RTF with some fairly sophisticated features (bold, italic, indented paragraphs, footnotes, images, index, vector graphics) and MS Word imports it flawlessly.
  - z1mm32m4n 9y ago
    I get what you're saying. RTF is nice as an open-standard alternative for storing rich text. But once again we see this described as "exporting." The focus is on the silo. You're in the silo or you're not. Rather, the focus should be on the data, and applications should merely manipulate them.[^1] [^1]: In many ways, there is a similar distinction between programming models. For example, in an "object-oriented" style the object owns the data and the functions on that data. In a "functional" style, the data exists, and there are functions on that data. The analogy isn't perfect, but at least it sheds new light on the word processing issue.
GnarfGnarf 9y ago
Nice demo. I wonder if it handles tables, images. How is the document stored? Can it import text-based formatted files (eg: RTF)? Is there a Windows version?
derefr 9y ago
"Word processors" were always a stilted compromise; they try to weave together the acts of composition and layout, when each necessarily constrains the other. As you compose a document in a word processor, you end up "fighting yourself"—making changes on the composition side that require matching changes on the layout side, or vice-versa. And not only this, the two tasks are mutually distracting—fiddling with layout after writing a single sentence can be used as a means of procrastinating from writing the next sentence; and endless copyediting can be used as a distraction from deciding on layout. A program that functions to do both tasks concurrently, is often far less than the sum of its parts, in productivity terms. Everything is much simplified if you just avoid this weaving altogether, and adopt a content pipeline approach, as every commercial book publisher, newspaper and magazine does. In this approach, you use pure-composition programs for your composition, and pure-layout programs for your layout. When you are working on one, you are not distracted with the demands of the other. In fact, two different people can be working asynchronously on these two components; and, indeed, if the work of one stage is finished first, this enables an extremely useful static constraint on the work of the other, simplifying the decision-making for it greatly. Layout can determine target word-count; or word-count and paragraph composition can decide layout. What you don't have is the constant tweaking, pitting half-finished layout and half-finished prose against one-another. Each is effectively opaque to the other until the end of the process. The most wonderful thing that has happened to composition in recent memory is the GUI Markdown editor. Until these, all composition programs that weren't simply plaintext, had at least some layout elements. (This is because their target format was RTF, and RTF contains things like per-line margin settings.) But .md is a fine format for storing compositions: it lets you specify the "tone" of text with markup, but contains no mechanism to (reliably) specify final appearance. Combine such documents with a program like Publisher or InDesign (or, partially, LyX or Pages) for layout, and you've got a very nice workflow. And, as a side-benefit, the prose created during the composition step will be exactly what is needed for web publishing as well.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- wanderer 9y ago
  > a stilted compromise Not to me. I was so happy when I tried MacWrite on my new (early 1984) Macintosh. I enjoy "fighting myself" because I am very unwilling to separate content and appearance. InDesign provides me with some succor but nowhere near what I would like. It is not visual enough. Why can't I align text by dragging a vertical line onto the text and request alignment to that? After all, this can be done with figures in InDesign, and unlike tabs, you get an immediate sense of what the result of the alignment will look like. (A sad setback in word processing is Apple's Pages. It has two modes "word processing" and "page layout". I hope Larry Tesler never encountered it.)
Upvoter33 9y ago
Article doesn't discuss LaTeX enough - skip. :)
- analog31 9y ago
  Or Jupyter. I've gotten to the point where I can't use a text editor unless it's capable of computation.
plg 9y ago
I'm an academic. If there was something that was: 1. not siloed in a binary format, i.e. could export to a plaintext-ish format 2. had a gui for those who want it 3. had seamless citation/bibliography tools, e.g. based on Citation Style Language (CSL) & web lookup e.g. on Google Scholar & PubMed 4. had seamless integration for Figures + numbering/captioning, Tables + numbering/captioning I would pay lotsa $$ for it I know LaTeX tools and/or pandoc tools can accomplish this but they are not user friendly enough
- mathperson 9y ago
  1. Latex does all of this. 2. Latex is user friendly....seriously. have you used latex for anything? Latex is incredibly easy to learn.
- hsitz 9y ago
  Except for the gui (by which I assume you mean wysiwyg) Emacs with Org-mode meets these requirements, albeit requires a bit of configuring and a couple add-ons. It takes a bit of learning, though, and wouldn't meet a user-friendly requirement. Org-mode does meet a few wysiwyg items (font size, underlining, italics, etc.) but certainly isn't full wysiwyg solution. Still, it's probably a better solution than LaTeX, because (1) Org documents can be seamlessly exported to LaTeX (and many other formats), (2) Org documents tend to have much cleaner (or even no markup) compared to LaTeX, and (3) add-ons extending functionality can be easily crafted in Emacs.
  - hsitz 9y ago
    To get an idea of what you can do in Orgmode, a good place to check is the books/publications linked on John Kitchin's page. He's a professor of chemistry who uses Orgmode for lots of different things. Among other things (and also listed on the linked page), he is the author of the org-ref extension that integrates citations and referencing into Orgmode, using the bibtex database: http://kitchingroup.cheme.cmu.edu/blog/2014/08/08/What-we-are-using-org-mode-for/ http://kitchingroup.cheme.cmu.edu/blog/2014/08/08/What-we-ar... Here is a youtube video demonstrating use of the org-ref extension for citations and references: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyvpSVl4_dg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyvpSVl4_dg
qrbLPHiKpiux 9y ago
Focus on the text first -> plain text, Markdown. Then copy/paste into word, or preferably something else for formatting. Too many distractions in a modern word processor.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  "Distractions" of course meaning "features I, personally, have not had occasion to use" in this case.
emodendroket 9y ago
Word processors actually do quite a lot. Word is host to multiple scripting environments and can do all kinds of useful stuff (the "useless bloat" you're always hearing about).
- uberchet 9y ago
  It still shocks me how many folks absolutely ignore the features of Word that make it powerful. A huge one is styles. Before we had semantic markup on the Web, Word was doing something similar with meaningful styles that could drive document structure and whatnot. It's astonishing how often I see people either manually format headings (like, referencing a postit that says "heading: bold, 14pt") or use unstructured styles instead of the actual heading options. Word will give you a document outline in a "slide out" window that populates based on your headings. It can be HUGELY USEFUL when you're building a longer, more intricate document, and yet it's rarely used properly. It's baffling.
  - emodendroket 9y ago
    I understand why people don't use it correctly -- it requires a deeper level of knowledge, after all -- but I don't understand why I constantly see people in technical forums claiming it doesn't support such a thing.
    - uberchet 9y ago
      I could be flip and say "because Microsoft," but there's probably some truth there. Lots of very technical people reject MSFT out of hand, and for a long time it was pretty easy to understand why, but Word has always been very, very capable. The first time I used semantic style structure in a Word doc was in Word for DOS in about 1992.
uberchet 9y ago
That's interesting, but I think the author misses the fact that lots of writing is still done with the page in mind. That said, I absolutely do composition in tools other than Word most of the time unless I know I'm writing for print or a print-analogue (we deliver lots of work product as PDF, which may as well be printed). What I care more about than print or nonprint, though, is file format longevity, which is why most of what I do is in plain text. That's an orthogonal concern to the issues of the piece, but it still bears discussion given how much data over time has been lost in orphaned formats.

99 points by enkiv2 9y ago

Pretty fun article. I did a major Research Paper on slowing down the English "writing process" on purpose to focus more on fundamentals (grammar, spelling) without the assists of modern technology. Start with quill, eventually get to typewriter. Writing well takes active thought. That's why this quote is, to me, giggle worthy: >"In 15 years I think the input interface and the idea of a 'document' [will] be entirely reimagined," Chen suggests. "I don't think we'll be at telepathy in that timeframe but I can see a lot more speech and audio playing a larger role for input. Video is already augmenting the document, but VR could be ubiquitous by then." Formal writing style - especially in long essays - is quite different than spoken word cadences. Basically my point is people don't customarily speak with the same discipline or rigor that they might put into writing. Tack on the issue, in the US at least, of thick regional accents and I really, really don't see Voice Input being the amazing game changer it can be advertised as from time to time (see: Siri).

zokier 9y ago
While I'd concur in your skepticism about voice specifically, I still think documents are becoming increasingly multimedia, with elements such as video, interactive elements, graphs and tables etc, and I feel like traditional word processors, which are the go-to tool for many people for authoring, are woefully inadequate to handle such rich documents.
- douche 9y ago
  Most of the time, I feel like it would be easier to write HTML markup to style documents than it is to poke and prod at the Word formatting options. In college, when I was routinely having to write papers that needed footnotes and specific formatting styles, I nearly broke down and learned LaTex, I got so frustrated. And, with HTML, it would be trivial to add in the types of multimedia elements you mention. If only I could convince the non-technical people and management on my team to ditch Word docs... If nothing more, it more make version-control merge conflicts so much less painful to deal with.
  - 6stringmerc 9y ago
    SharePoint was a great asset for my proposal team over in Finance for version control issues and Word compatibility. Not a cure-all, but it worked for the non-technical folks well enough (and saved a lot of heart burn).
  - zokier 9y ago
    Do you know any visual (dare I say wysiwyg) HTML authoring tools that adhere and emphasize semantically sensible markup and working efficiently with styles, especially in the context of using some predefined corporate templates? Something that captures the few good bits from Word and applies those to HTML based document model?
  - smacktoward 9y ago
    The funny thing is, what you're dreaming of is basically WordPerfect, the word processor that ruled the world for many years until Word came along and killed it. WordPerfect didn't use HTML for formatting, because HTML hadn't been invented yet. But it did use its own set of formatting tags, which are more or less analogous. And it had a "Reveal Codes" key you could press at any time to show all the formatting tags that were active in the current document, letting you tweak their placement, add new ones by hand, etc. You could always get directly at the logic that was being used to format your document. Word's big selling point was that, being Windows-based, it could abstract all that complexity away and let you format documents entirely visually. And it worked! Or at least, it worked well enough for most people most of the time. But the problem with Word's approach has always been that, when it doesn't work, it can be incredibly frustrating to figure out exactly why. Which was never a problem with WordPerfect, since there was no layer of hidden formatting magic sitting between you and your document.
    - jhbadger 9y ago
      And likewise WordStar, which was the previous standard word processor that WordPerfect displaced, also had visible formatting codes.
  - feeboo 9y ago
    If only we had a decent way to print those html pages to pdf. But It seems like the print-css is kind of neglected. The stuff barely is doing what it should(page-break and friends). Neither can you really use min-height=20mm. A pity. And the nicer pdf creators (weasyprint) don't understand the new css rules like flexbox or grid. So we are still stuck. No easy way to force a footer to the end of a printed page via css.
- 6stringmerc 9y ago
  Actually I will do my best to agree with you outright on the multimedia front! I'm a huge fan of Medium (70+ pieces on there) because of the freedom to intermingle material with the text. It's quite powerful. However, I use those elements as supplements to the written word, not vice-versa (ex: blog spam / slide shows with large image, little text, big ads)
bluGill 9y ago
Some portions of the bible were written by a scribe who took dictation. Sometimes they took the pen to write something important in their own hand, (normally a closing), but most of it was not written this way. Today we consider their writing formal. Was it that way then though? (I've never actually cared enough about the topic to see if history says anything more)
- douche 9y ago
  The way that the Bible reads today, in English, after countless revisions and reformulations, translations and copyings, is so far removed from the original Greek or Aramaic that it's almost inconceivable that the words on the page are even close to what was written two thousand years ago. The formality of the Bible in English can be in large part attributed to the King James version, and other versions of that time period, where you've got the turmoil of the reformation, with the English King as the head of the Anglican church in opposition to Rome, as well as a relatively tumultuous internal political climate, and so a lot of passages were tweaked around to reinforce royal authority.
  - AnimalMuppet 9y ago
    The manuscript evidence very strongly disagrees with you.
  - Garfgon 9y ago
    Per Wikipedia the different New Testament texts have a 99.5% accuracy with each other, and the oldest existing manuscripts were written ~200 years after the original: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textual_criticism_of_the_New_Testament https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textual_criticism_of_the_New_T.... Modern translations are done based on analysis of the existing Greek manuscripts, not based on the KJV so any political meddling with the KJV doesn't affect the NIV, ESV or similar.
    - Nomentatus 9y ago
      True but unhelpful, since Aramaic had riches and critical distinctions that have been dropped entirely or conflated on the way through low ancient Greek and into older English. For example, four or five different words with quite different meanings have all been rendered as "forgive" or "forgiveness" in the KJV translation making a contradictory and uninformative mess. (Philosophically speaking - it's still great if not entirely comprehensible poetry.) Given how central the Bible was to that concept, the KJV also impoverished our language, setting up an impossible problem for translators and helping to make us all much more ethically moronic than we'd otherwise be.
Spooky23 9y ago
Great point. The only people I've seen (and Ive tracked metrics in stuff like this among large user) using dictation beyond texts and short replies are specialists like attorneys and doctors and people in a bind with injuries. Personally, i type faster and more accurately than I talk. The 1960 version of me would probably prefer dictation!
- 6stringmerc 9y ago
  A friend of mine is an extremely talented developer (between jobs actually) and he loves his tech gear. Specifically smart phone tech. We had a long argument about usefulness, because as a Writer, I carry a small notebook and pen. Our joking back and forth went over stuff like "Battery Life" (Phone has a concern, notebook does not) and "Water Resistance" (neither scores that great), "Cost and Maintenance" and so on and so forth. For my needs - writing notes - the little old school approach won, but it was inferior for his needs.
  - NobleLie 9y ago
    Digital becomes a real boon when you are creating knowledge networks; connecting pieces of information, or tagging them. This metadata is, as far as im aware, best suited for being stored digitally. Disclaimer: I'm working on a knowledge management app thats core focus is connections and tagging (amongst many other useful features)
- LaikaF 9y ago
  One of the better pieces of advise I got in college was to use dictation to make a rough draft. Basically explain what your topic is about as if you were telling a friend, or get a friend and explain it to them. Then go back and edit.
  - ijidak 9y ago
    Huh. Interesting. I'm going to have to try that. Sometimes the writing process does get in the way, as speech allows for faster changes in thought and direction than writing or typing, I feel. Which makes it good during the brainstorming phase.
munificent 9y ago
> Writing well takes active thought. That's why this quote is, to me, giggle worthy Sure, but it's not clear that forcing all of that thought to happen before the first draft actually improves the final result. Many writers feel they need to bang out a shitty first draft and that much of the magic happens in later revisions. > Tack on the issue, in the US at least, of thick regional accents and I really, really don't see Voice Input being the amazing game changer it can be advertised as from time to time I often experience a funny phenomenon. A lot of times when I'm out for a walk or a long drive, I'll start thinking about fiction ideas. Before too long, my wandering mind drills down to what I think is an actual internal monologue of prose. In my head, it flows smoothly and sounds compelling. I always mean to start writing it down when I get home but never seem to find the time or discipline or whatever to do so. Maybe already being in the middle of a 200k-word nonfiction book has something to do with that... What I've always wondered is if I am actually narrating real words or just sort of imagining that I am in that way that it's always easier to imagine a drawing than it is to draw it. The real experiment would be to get a recorder and start dictating, but I never have. If I did, would that work? If so, than it means I might "write" works in this way that for simple practical reasons would never come about at all without the speech recognition. Even if I were to summon the discipline to manually transcribe my inner monologue, would something be lost in the translation? Or gained? Or both?
- adrianratnapala 9y ago
  I have these monologues too, and they are far better written than anything that comes from my hands. So I am pretty sure I am composing in "mentalese" augmented with just enough English to fool me into thinking I am making good prose. Speaking out loud while thinking is a good exercise, and more difficult than just thinking. But when I do it ends up in a conversational style, as if I was giving an talk to tech colleagues. Also when I am in Germany, I find it very easy to "think in German" even though I can't speak properly.
- mirimir 9y ago
  When I'm starting a piece, I typically bang out whatever comes to mind. I keep at that for a while, and then rearrange it, as a crude outline. Then I flesh it out. Often, first thing in the day, blocks just come out, as if someone is dictating to me. Sometimes, I wake up seeing printed text. Then I go back and rewrite, and shuffle as needed. I've come to like Geany, because it's simple, but has spell check. I don't have much need for layout, beyond HTML.
tspike 9y ago
The best writing I ever did was on an Alphasmart 2000 word processor [0]. I'm way better at getting my thoughts down using a keyboard than pen and paper, but computers are just too distracting. This little thing was perfect. A 4-line black and white LCD screen with save files and no frills. Push the power button and start writing. Use AA batteries that last forever. Practically indestructible - toss it in a backpack and go. [0] http://lowendmac.com/1999/alphasmart-2000-a-different-kind-of-word-processor/ http://lowendmac.com/1999/alphasmart-2000-a-different-kind-o...
accordionclown 9y ago
> Formal writing style - especially in long essays - is quite different than spoken word cadences. i think many observers say that reader preferences are trending to a more conversational style these days anyway. and, if you have an iphone, you can use the dictate command on the keyboard to input into the notes app. you need to do a fair bit of editing, it's true, but many first drafts require that anyway. so all in all, i think that dictating your first draft is a pretty smart idea, especially if these conversational flashes happen to you during a walk, and also if you are prone to forgetting them before you get them down. for instance, i dictated the first draft of this comment on my walk just now, and then emailed it to myself to post it here. i cleaned it up, of course, but if you want to see the original, as is, i posted it here: > http://zenmagiclove.com/simple/comment.txt http://zenmagiclove.com/simple/comment.txt
- emodendroket 9y ago
  > i think many observers say that reader preferences are trending to a more conversational style these days anyway. Even if that is true, actual conversation is full of digressions, half-completed thoughts, repetition, incorrectly chosen words, etc. It's remarkable how incoherent a transcript of speech can look compared to how coherent it sounds listening to it (Donald Trump is a prime example of the phenomenon, as an untrained public speaker).
  - accordionclown 9y ago
    nobody talked about dictating "true, actual conversation". here's what prompted that: > when I'm out for a walk or a long drive, I'll start thinking about fiction ideas. Before too long, my wandering mind drills down to what I think is an actual internal monologue of prose. In my head, it flows smoothly and sounds compelling. I always mean to start writing it down when I get home but never seem to find the time or discipline or whatever to do so.
    - emodendroket 9y ago
      "True" belongs to the phrase "even if that is true."
ido 9y ago
I have a friend who is a professional translator and apperantly speech to text is heavily used in that field (and thus translators often benefit from having quite beefy PCs).
- emodendroket 9y ago
  That seems odd, since translators are usually concerned with written, rather than spoken material (the latter generally being the province of interpreters).
  - ido 9y ago
    Why? She reads the written source material and dictates it to the computer in the target language.
    - emodendroket 9y ago
      Oh. I imagined the source was a recording.
kakarot 9y ago
You can't make giant evil genius evidence walls with vocal samples. We will always have use cases that prefer the written word.
emodendroket 9y ago
US regional accents are pretty mild compared to what you would see in some other languages (and even to some extent to what you'd see in English in some other places).
johnchristopher 9y ago
> Pretty fun article. I did a major Research Paper on slowing down the English "writing process" on purpose to focus more on fundamentals (grammar, spelling) without the assists of modern technology. Start with quill, eventually get to typewriter. But it's only recently (two century or three) that grammar and spelling are the fundamentals.

z1mm32m4n 9y ago

There are a couple things that all these "death to word processors" articles overlook: 1. Stickiness. Google Docs (and even Microsoft Word) work so well when you use them in conjunction with their respective ecosystem. Many users choose Google Docs over Dropbox Paper simply because they already have Google Apps accounts, even though as a product what they really want is something more like Dropbox Paper. Inevitably, what happens is that those who can try out a new product on a small team do so, but those who are forced to work between teams or even between companies choose the solution they're already using; i.e., the stickiest. 2. Plain text is powerful I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir here, but each new "office productivity" or "word processor replacement" tool comes with it's own silo. Even Microsoft Word, which has it's own file type that you can save to your Desktop, is largely a proprietary format. You can export data out of Google Docs or Dropbox Paper, etc., but the idea is that you're leaving the promised land. You're packing up and moving somewhere else. On the other hand, we know from the Unix philosophy that plain text is a universal interface. Using plain text can help us escape these siloes. The problem, of course, is that from grade school we teach students that to edit text we use Microsoft Word. There are a lot of cool new products in this design space of "word processor replacements," but few which tackle these two fundamental issues.

GnarfGnarf 9y ago
MS Word exports RTF, which is a pretty powerful plain-text format. Our application generates RTF with some fairly sophisticated features (bold, italic, indented paragraphs, footnotes, images, index, vector graphics) and MS Word imports it flawlessly.
- z1mm32m4n 9y ago
  I get what you're saying. RTF is nice as an open-standard alternative for storing rich text. But once again we see this described as "exporting." The focus is on the silo. You're in the silo or you're not. Rather, the focus should be on the data, and applications should merely manipulate them.[^1] [^1]: In many ways, there is a similar distinction between programming models. For example, in an "object-oriented" style the object owns the data and the functions on that data. In a "functional" style, the data exists, and there are functions on that data. The analogy isn't perfect, but at least it sheds new light on the word processing issue.

GnarfGnarf 9y ago

Nice demo. I wonder if it handles tables, images. How is the document stored? Can it import text-based formatted files (eg: RTF)? Is there a Windows version?

derefr 9y ago

"Word processors" were always a stilted compromise; they try to weave together the acts of composition and layout, when each necessarily constrains the other. As you compose a document in a word processor, you end up "fighting yourself"—making changes on the composition side that require matching changes on the layout side, or vice-versa. And not only this, the two tasks are mutually distracting—fiddling with layout after writing a single sentence can be used as a means of procrastinating from writing the next sentence; and endless copyediting can be used as a distraction from deciding on layout. A program that functions to do both tasks concurrently, is often far less than the sum of its parts, in productivity terms. Everything is much simplified if you just avoid this weaving altogether, and adopt a content pipeline approach, as every commercial book publisher, newspaper and magazine does. In this approach, you use pure-composition programs for your composition, and pure-layout programs for your layout. When you are working on one, you are not distracted with the demands of the other. In fact, two different people can be working asynchronously on these two components; and, indeed, if the work of one stage is finished first, this enables an extremely useful static constraint on the work of the other, simplifying the decision-making for it greatly. Layout can determine target word-count; or word-count and paragraph composition can decide layout. What you don't have is the constant tweaking, pitting half-finished layout and half-finished prose against one-another. Each is effectively opaque to the other until the end of the process. The most wonderful thing that has happened to composition in recent memory is the GUI Markdown editor. Until these, all composition programs that weren't simply plaintext, had at least some layout elements. (This is because their target format was RTF, and RTF contains things like per-line margin settings.) But .md is a fine format for storing compositions: it lets you specify the "tone" of text with markup, but contains no mechanism to (reliably) specify final appearance. Combine such documents with a program like Publisher or InDesign (or, partially, LyX or Pages) for layout, and you've got a very nice workflow. And, as a side-benefit, the prose created during the composition step will be exactly what is needed for web publishing as well.

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wanderer 9y ago
> a stilted compromise Not to me. I was so happy when I tried MacWrite on my new (early 1984) Macintosh. I enjoy "fighting myself" because I am very unwilling to separate content and appearance. InDesign provides me with some succor but nowhere near what I would like. It is not visual enough. Why can't I align text by dragging a vertical line onto the text and request alignment to that? After all, this can be done with figures in InDesign, and unlike tabs, you get an immediate sense of what the result of the alignment will look like. (A sad setback in word processing is Apple's Pages. It has two modes "word processing" and "page layout". I hope Larry Tesler never encountered it.)

Upvoter33 9y ago

Article doesn't discuss LaTeX enough - skip. :)

analog31 9y ago
Or Jupyter. I've gotten to the point where I can't use a text editor unless it's capable of computation.

plg 9y ago

I'm an academic. If there was something that was: 1. not siloed in a binary format, i.e. could export to a plaintext-ish format 2. had a gui for those who want it 3. had seamless citation/bibliography tools, e.g. based on Citation Style Language (CSL) & web lookup e.g. on Google Scholar & PubMed 4. had seamless integration for Figures + numbering/captioning, Tables + numbering/captioning I would pay lotsa $$ for it I know LaTeX tools and/or pandoc tools can accomplish this but they are not user friendly enough

mathperson 9y ago
1. Latex does all of this. 2. Latex is user friendly....seriously. have you used latex for anything? Latex is incredibly easy to learn.
hsitz 9y ago
Except for the gui (by which I assume you mean wysiwyg) Emacs with Org-mode meets these requirements, albeit requires a bit of configuring and a couple add-ons. It takes a bit of learning, though, and wouldn't meet a user-friendly requirement. Org-mode does meet a few wysiwyg items (font size, underlining, italics, etc.) but certainly isn't full wysiwyg solution. Still, it's probably a better solution than LaTeX, because (1) Org documents can be seamlessly exported to LaTeX (and many other formats), (2) Org documents tend to have much cleaner (or even no markup) compared to LaTeX, and (3) add-ons extending functionality can be easily crafted in Emacs.
- hsitz 9y ago
  To get an idea of what you can do in Orgmode, a good place to check is the books/publications linked on John Kitchin's page. He's a professor of chemistry who uses Orgmode for lots of different things. Among other things (and also listed on the linked page), he is the author of the org-ref extension that integrates citations and referencing into Orgmode, using the bibtex database: http://kitchingroup.cheme.cmu.edu/blog/2014/08/08/What-we-are-using-org-mode-for/ http://kitchingroup.cheme.cmu.edu/blog/2014/08/08/What-we-ar... Here is a youtube video demonstrating use of the org-ref extension for citations and references: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyvpSVl4_dg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyvpSVl4_dg

qrbLPHiKpiux 9y ago

Focus on the text first -> plain text, Markdown. Then copy/paste into word, or preferably something else for formatting. Too many distractions in a modern word processor.

emodendroket 9y ago
"Distractions" of course meaning "features I, personally, have not had occasion to use" in this case.

emodendroket 9y ago

Word processors actually do quite a lot. Word is host to multiple scripting environments and can do all kinds of useful stuff (the "useless bloat" you're always hearing about).

uberchet 9y ago
It still shocks me how many folks absolutely ignore the features of Word that make it powerful. A huge one is styles. Before we had semantic markup on the Web, Word was doing something similar with meaningful styles that could drive document structure and whatnot. It's astonishing how often I see people either manually format headings (like, referencing a postit that says "heading: bold, 14pt") or use unstructured styles instead of the actual heading options. Word will give you a document outline in a "slide out" window that populates based on your headings. It can be HUGELY USEFUL when you're building a longer, more intricate document, and yet it's rarely used properly. It's baffling.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  I understand why people don't use it correctly -- it requires a deeper level of knowledge, after all -- but I don't understand why I constantly see people in technical forums claiming it doesn't support such a thing.
  - uberchet 9y ago
    I could be flip and say "because Microsoft," but there's probably some truth there. Lots of very technical people reject MSFT out of hand, and for a long time it was pretty easy to understand why, but Word has always been very, very capable. The first time I used semantic style structure in a Word doc was in Word for DOS in about 1992.

uberchet 9y ago

That's interesting, but I think the author misses the fact that lots of writing is still done with the page in mind. That said, I absolutely do composition in tools other than Word most of the time unless I know I'm writing for print or a print-analogue (we deliver lots of work product as PDF, which may as well be printed). What I care more about than print or nonprint, though, is file format longevity, which is why most of what I do is in plain text. That's an orthogonal concern to the issues of the piece, but it still bears discussion given how much data over time has been lost in orphaned formats.