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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

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.
  - danso 9y ago
    I'm a plaintext evangelist but "the focus should be on the data" is not the only priority for the general user. The reason When the average layperson sees anything (Markdown formatted or not) in a Sublime Text tab, they see "code". Rich-text, WYSIWYG editors give people more of a feeling of control and perceived ability to see the big picture. Sure, we can argue that this impression is largely superficial and adds more distraction than anything. But that's because we're experienced computer users who know that "code" directly relates to what WYSIWYG displays, i.e. WYSIWYG is just a middleman. But this is something that has to be experienced to really be grokked. If it weren't for sites like CSS Zen Garden that made it clear how style could be completely separate from content, I'd probably still be making pages in Dreamweaver today.
    - loup-vaillant 9y ago
      The reason for our privilege, I think, comes from the abysmal education the "regular user" is getting. At school, pupils are taught Microsoft Word most often, and LibreOffice at best. They know nothing but WYSIWYG and separated applications that don't talk to each other (Microsoft Office can be scripted with VBA, but they don't know that). The fundamentals of computing are not taught. File formats are not taught beyond "this app opens that format". Plain text is that ugly stuff you read with Notepad. The internet is accessed with a web browser. And so on. --- This needs to change. Computing education should be expanded, and other curriculum should be cut or adapted accordingly: Data formats should be taught. HTML could serve as a first example: you can view it online, you can save the page and view it offline, you can view the source with ctrl+U, or even modify the source with Notepad (Kudos if your school uses a free operating system, but let's not require it right away). Rudiments of programming should be taught. Something like Human Resource Machine (a coding game in pseudo-assembly) could serve as an introduction —or we could stop there, that game is pretty complete. Now that's quite a heavy topic (I expect Human Resource Machine alone would take a whole semester), so I propose we use the Math class for this, and cut on other math topics (I'm not sure which, though). The internet and the web should be taught (and not just used). I believe the English class is most suited: the internet is mostly about reading and writing (YouTube notwithstanding). We should cut down on classical literature and literary analysis, and focus more on information processing (reading more or less reliable stuff and come up with reliable information), and public writing. If there's a class that ostensibly teaches citizenship, it should be used to teach public debate, which are arguably more important than the arcanes of your country's constitution.
monksy 9y ago
> 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. This is exactly why walled gardens are terrible. It's killing innovation and actual improvement in this case.
emodendroket 9y ago
Plain text is "powerful" in some ways, but supporting links, styles, a bibliography, and even embedded scripts, in the way Word does, is not a power it has.
- uberchet 9y ago
  Well, it kinda depends on what you mean by "plain text" and what you mean by "support." You can get a lot of these things through text-markup systems like Markdown. There's a growing class of editors that strive to provide a richer document experience while still relying on plain text as the file format. I don't usually suggest normal people adopt it, but an example of this kind of hybrid approach is Orgmode in emacs. I can do ALL SORTS OF THINGS with my org files, but the actual data is still just plaintext with minimal and human-readable markup. The editor does the rest of the work. I find that promising.
  - emodendroket 9y ago
    If you mean "it's technically text but you have to have a program that knows how to parse it" then it's not really much of an advantage over docx having zipped XML. There was an (astute, I think) article from "Joel on Software" years ago saying that the main reason that supporting the Word format was hard was that, by implication, you needed to implement every feature Word had to do it right.
    - uberchet 9y ago
      The examples I'd hold up as useful here keep the markup simple, so that the files are still usable when viewed directly, but provide lots of other functions by being clever. Again, Orgmode is a great example. I can (and sometimes do) use my org files outside of emacs.
    - accordionclown 9y ago
      > it's not really much of an advantage over docx having zipped XML. a plain-text light-markup file -- easily read, parsed, and rewritten when necessary by a plethora of apps (text-editors, spell-checkers, grammar-checkers, link-checkers, sanitizers, validators, on and on) -- is a big advantage (gargantuan!) over a complex xml-format document stored in a .zip container. and editing and ease-of-use (and re-use and repurposability) is much friendlier as well.

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.
- danso 9y ago
  I'm a plaintext evangelist but "the focus should be on the data" is not the only priority for the general user. The reason When the average layperson sees anything (Markdown formatted or not) in a Sublime Text tab, they see "code". Rich-text, WYSIWYG editors give people more of a feeling of control and perceived ability to see the big picture. Sure, we can argue that this impression is largely superficial and adds more distraction than anything. But that's because we're experienced computer users who know that "code" directly relates to what WYSIWYG displays, i.e. WYSIWYG is just a middleman. But this is something that has to be experienced to really be grokked. If it weren't for sites like CSS Zen Garden that made it clear how style could be completely separate from content, I'd probably still be making pages in Dreamweaver today.
  - loup-vaillant 9y ago
    The reason for our privilege, I think, comes from the abysmal education the "regular user" is getting. At school, pupils are taught Microsoft Word most often, and LibreOffice at best. They know nothing but WYSIWYG and separated applications that don't talk to each other (Microsoft Office can be scripted with VBA, but they don't know that). The fundamentals of computing are not taught. File formats are not taught beyond "this app opens that format". Plain text is that ugly stuff you read with Notepad. The internet is accessed with a web browser. And so on. --- This needs to change. Computing education should be expanded, and other curriculum should be cut or adapted accordingly: Data formats should be taught. HTML could serve as a first example: you can view it online, you can save the page and view it offline, you can view the source with ctrl+U, or even modify the source with Notepad (Kudos if your school uses a free operating system, but let's not require it right away). Rudiments of programming should be taught. Something like Human Resource Machine (a coding game in pseudo-assembly) could serve as an introduction —or we could stop there, that game is pretty complete. Now that's quite a heavy topic (I expect Human Resource Machine alone would take a whole semester), so I propose we use the Math class for this, and cut on other math topics (I'm not sure which, though). The internet and the web should be taught (and not just used). I believe the English class is most suited: the internet is mostly about reading and writing (YouTube notwithstanding). We should cut down on classical literature and literary analysis, and focus more on information processing (reading more or less reliable stuff and come up with reliable information), and public writing. If there's a class that ostensibly teaches citizenship, it should be used to teach public debate, which are arguably more important than the arcanes of your country's constitution.

monksy 9y ago

> 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. This is exactly why walled gardens are terrible. It's killing innovation and actual improvement in this case.

emodendroket 9y ago

Plain text is "powerful" in some ways, but supporting links, styles, a bibliography, and even embedded scripts, in the way Word does, is not a power it has.

uberchet 9y ago
Well, it kinda depends on what you mean by "plain text" and what you mean by "support." You can get a lot of these things through text-markup systems like Markdown. There's a growing class of editors that strive to provide a richer document experience while still relying on plain text as the file format. I don't usually suggest normal people adopt it, but an example of this kind of hybrid approach is Orgmode in emacs. I can do ALL SORTS OF THINGS with my org files, but the actual data is still just plaintext with minimal and human-readable markup. The editor does the rest of the work. I find that promising.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  If you mean "it's technically text but you have to have a program that knows how to parse it" then it's not really much of an advantage over docx having zipped XML. There was an (astute, I think) article from "Joel on Software" years ago saying that the main reason that supporting the Word format was hard was that, by implication, you needed to implement every feature Word had to do it right.
  - uberchet 9y ago
    The examples I'd hold up as useful here keep the markup simple, so that the files are still usable when viewed directly, but provide lots of other functions by being clever. Again, Orgmode is a great example. I can (and sometimes do) use my org files outside of emacs.
  - accordionclown 9y ago
    > it's not really much of an advantage over docx having zipped XML. a plain-text light-markup file -- easily read, parsed, and rewritten when necessary by a plethora of apps (text-editors, spell-checkers, grammar-checkers, link-checkers, sanitizers, validators, on and on) -- is a big advantage (gargantuan!) over a complex xml-format document stored in a .zip container. and editing and ease-of-use (and re-use and repurposability) is much friendlier as well.