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I always thought that WordPerfect was the most dangerous word processor, due to its userbase.
by mhd 7y ago
I always thought that WordPerfect was the most dangerous word processor, due to its userbase.
- mirimir 7y agoHuh? What dangerous userbase did it have?
- ahje 7y ago"Everyone" :)
- mhd 7y agoLawyers. WP was really, really common amongst the legal profession for a while, and from what I've heard, being forced to migrate to Word is still much lamented. But it's quite a bit harder to pull a GRRM there.
- mirimir 7y agoDamn. I was almost going to guess that. One of my clients was still using WordPerfect for DOS in the late 90s. They didn't want to deal with the retraining cost for secretaries and paralegals. I always did like WordPerfect much more than Word. It was fundamentally a markup-style text editor. And you could switch to raw-text mode if necessary, and actually edit the markup. Word, on the other hand, is entirely opaque.
- quickthrower2 7y agoWord is pilcro hell. God knows where what formatting came in. Onenote is a disaster. There’s a reason these apps have a “format painter”.
- mirimir 7y agoHey, thanks! I didn't know that ¶ is a pilcro. But yeah, you can edit the format on one little paragraph, and the entire document format changes. I do understand that one should define styles for documents, but I've never had the patience for that.
- mxuribe 7y agoTIL the name pilcro; thanks!
- quickthrower2 7y agoApologies to all I have mislead! It's actually spelt "Pilcrow". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilcrow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilcrow. ¶
- mirimir 7y agoSo I looked, and found: > Scribes would often leave space before paragraphs to allow rubricators to draw the pilcrow. With the introduction of the printing press, space before paragraphs was still left for rubricators to draw by hand; however, rubricators could not draw fast enough for printers and often would leave the beginnings of the paragraphs as blank. This is how the indent before paragraphs was created. Amazing. Had no clue.