I think he is academic and he means something like LaTeX. There is very little choice for nonprogrammers. Word is not bad it's just editor. In skilled hands i

I think he is academic and he means something like LaTeX. There is very little choice for nonprogrammers. Word is not bad it's just editor. In skilled hands its fine. Actually the biggest typographic problems people make are not really because of Word but because default office paper sizes A4/Letter are too wide for one column. For optimal 60-70 characters per line you either need giant font size or two columns so they put people into quite difficult situation. Why this happened? Typewriters use monospaced fonts that are much wider and we switched to proportional typefaces but paper size stayed.