3 ms·

Right now I'm writing a document in plain text. Not markdown but org-mode. I could export it as markdown for collaboration purposes easily enough. What I will g

Right now I'm writing a document in plain text. Not markdown but org-mode. I could export it as markdown for collaboration purposes easily enough. What I will get at the end is a higher quality document than most Word users will produce but with a minimal amount of effort. The thing is a document only really contains a handful of different elements. Therefore you only need a handful of styles. What you do is make a template document for pandoc in the format of your choice (e.g. MS Word) and then your markdown/org-mode document can be automatically converted into that style. The problem with Word is it makes choosing ad-hoc styles really easy instead of promoting the use of styles. It has developed a culture of people who think about text being "bold" rather than text being "a heading" or "emphasised" etc. We teach this distinctionfor HTML and CSS (and it is, to some extent, used) but for some reason still use Word for writing documents.

zokier 9y ago
Styles have been best practice in Word too for decades. And in current versions the styles portion is like half of the default "home" ribbon, with big buttons and fancy live previews and all, so you can't really argue that they would be especially hidden in the UI. Still, it is true that your average Word user still typically produces fairly horrible documents. Why is that? I suspect that large part comes from that they have been thrown in front of Word with very little guidance or training, because "everyone knows how to use Word", and they then just struggle on, occasionally googling and finding equally bad hints that they are unable to recognize as such because they don't know the fundamentals. Despite of its appreances Word is actually fairly complex (probably too much so for its own good) software. Another big part, especially in corporate environment, is that "templates" that people are supposed to use are almost universally horrible. Either the concrete template files are bad, or the users are given some other document and told to make theirs look the same, which typically won't end well due aforementioned reasons. Sure, Word also has true issues in this area too, but lot of the problems are cultural, and of course there is a feedback thing going on also that bad practices fester more bad practices and sort of also suppresses MS from radically improvong the situation.
- cup-of-tea 9y ago
  > I suspect that large part comes from that they have been thrown in front of Word with very little guidance or training, because "everyone knows how to use Word", and they then just struggle on Yes, I would agree with this. Even worse is that typing is also an expected skill but very few people can actually do it. Almost every person I come across for whom typing should be a necessary part of their job are simply incapable of doing it. How can we expect people to use software like Word if they can't even type? But I really do think that in the vast majority of cases people do not need to be using Word. It could very well be done in a plain text format and the documents would look better as a result. Much of Word's functionality is very much a "could" rather than a "should".

zokier 9y ago

Styles have been best practice in Word too for decades. And in current versions the styles portion is like half of the default "home" ribbon, with big buttons and fancy live previews and all, so you can't really argue that they would be especially hidden in the UI. Still, it is true that your average Word user still typically produces fairly horrible documents. Why is that? I suspect that large part comes from that they have been thrown in front of Word with very little guidance or training, because "everyone knows how to use Word", and they then just struggle on, occasionally googling and finding equally bad hints that they are unable to recognize as such because they don't know the fundamentals. Despite of its appreances Word is actually fairly complex (probably too much so for its own good) software. Another big part, especially in corporate environment, is that "templates" that people are supposed to use are almost universally horrible. Either the concrete template files are bad, or the users are given some other document and told to make theirs look the same, which typically won't end well due aforementioned reasons. Sure, Word also has true issues in this area too, but lot of the problems are cultural, and of course there is a feedback thing going on also that bad practices fester more bad practices and sort of also suppresses MS from radically improvong the situation.

cup-of-tea 9y ago
> I suspect that large part comes from that they have been thrown in front of Word with very little guidance or training, because "everyone knows how to use Word", and they then just struggle on Yes, I would agree with this. Even worse is that typing is also an expected skill but very few people can actually do it. Almost every person I come across for whom typing should be a necessary part of their job are simply incapable of doing it. How can we expect people to use software like Word if they can't even type? But I really do think that in the vast majority of cases people do not need to be using Word. It could very well be done in a plain text format and the documents would look better as a result. Much of Word's functionality is very much a "could" rather than a "should".