4 ms·

The LibreOffice project's imprimatur should be to stop existing. This isn't facetious or snark. Make it a long-term goal—let's say 15 years. The editing para

• amadeuspagel 6y ago
  Whatever the kind of thing you're talking about is, I don't see why the companies associated with LibreOffice would be in a good position to do it, how they can see where the puck should be better then anyone else.
• mattkrause 6y ago
  I'm not sure I understand why you think this would be a good goal. Plaintext formats are certainly nice. Markdown can certainly do formatting for many simple documents (school reports, memos, etc). Sometimes, however, you want more fine-grained, print-style control over layout, even for documents that are often sent electronically (e.g., résumés). People still do print things out too, like fliers and signup sheets. A lot of Word's other features seem superfluous, but I'd bet that almost everyone uses an idiosyncratic subset of them: I don't use mail merge, but depend on "Compare Documents", for example.
  • cxr 6y ago
    > I'm not sure I understand why you think this would be a good goal. You do already know. It's in your next sentence. > Sometimes, however, you want more fine-grained, print-style control That's fine. PDFs aren't going away, nor would aiming for the kind of thing I mentioned preclude the plaintext formats from finally gaining the ability to control print-level details with a set of formatting directives if you flip the switch in the writing app to make it let you target a "print profile" for that document. In fact TeX—being a plaintext format that also happens to lead to many of the PDFs we see anyway—is already an example of how to get the ultimate "fine-grained, print-style control" without being a clunky document from an office suite, which aren't actually all that great at that level of control, anyway (but TeX itself is not well-suited for this use case, for its own reasons). The point is that most people shuttling Office documents around are most of the time not using it for those reasons, so their 80% use cases shouldn't carry the baggage nor impose it on others. It would be one thing if it were just a matter of people not knowing, but the reality is that neither the tooling nor the cultural inertia for those non-existent tools are really where they should be. > People still do print things out too, like fliers and signup sheets. nonsequitur
  • akho 6y ago
    Print-style control is not done in Word, it's done in Publisher. In typical office use, you'd want to enforce a firm-wide stylesheet, but Word makes that difficult by leaving too much control too easy to access: people continue to use font and paragraph ribbon groups outside creating new styles. The things that make Word valuable, compared to plain text, are in the “Review” (track changes, comments, compare), and “Insert” tabs. “References” and “Mailings” are nice if you need them, but can ultimately be handled in easier ways.
• hhas01 6y ago
  “The LibreOffice project's imprimatur should be to stop existing.” 100% agree with that. But your proposed substitute is nonsense on stilts. Markdown? Please. WYSIWYG exists for a reason. LibreOffice’s problem is that it’s playing Microsoft Office’s game by Microsoft Office’s rules. That is a game it cannot win. Microsoft Office succeeds not by being good at what it does but by being a massive monolith that no-one else can match. Those who try to replicate it only work themselves to death trying to do so. That’s a fools’ game. Instead of trying to build a better Office, look at what users try to/actually do with it and target that. For starters, a lot of people use Excel not as a programmable parallel calculator (spreadsheet) but as a tabular layout tool for ad-hoc/databaseable information. So build a grid layout tool that is entirely agnostic on programmability and back-end storage, and allow different components to plug in as needed. I’m always leery of pointing to component architectures like OpenDoc as those are a whole ’nother honeytrap in themselves, but Unix Philosophy posited that lots of small, simple, highly focused, and freely pluggable tools would scale better to solving users’ problems than the vast impenetrable monolithic architectures of Office et al. Unix/Linux may have failed to pay its own philosophy more than lip service (I mean, how many features is `ls` up to now? 50? 100?), but whereas MS Office is also mired in its own market success it’s never too late for the also-rans to rethink their losers’ game and rewrite its rules to be one they can win. They just have to want to change, and try something that hasn’t been tried. And yes, change means risk and potential for [greater] failure. But just look at Steve Jobs: he never beat Microsoft by building a better PC; he did it by radically redefining what “Personal Computing” means, inventing a completely new market of Personal Computing users, and being first to that market with the right product to sell them. So, no, an Office suite that runs in a web browser is not the sort of thing I’m talking about either. Although the web should, as you say, provide the foundation for a modern data editing and sharing system. But look at what people actually do today with “Office” software, regardless of whether it’s what that software was designed to do or not, and from there pinch off one well-defined use-case at a time and reformulate it in terms of basic reusable components joined together with some task-specific glue, then push that to that market as a tool just for them that does what they need done so much quicker, easier, and safer than anything else. (Ironically, the web originally conceived as a fully read-write platform where everyone could read and everyone could write, and it was only Berners-Lee’s corner-cutting impatience that recast it as a read-only platform with its editing keys jealously kept by a new high priesthood of “Web Developers”.) -- TL;DR: Let’s build a better “Office Suite” is the wrong game to play. “Let’s identify solve individual specific real-world problems that users actually have today”, and just happen to build those solutions in a way that keeps everything small, agile, flexible, and humble; instead of bloating into the traditional Big Ball of Mud that is wonderful for developer egos and customer lock-in and absolutely awful for anything else.
• akho 6y ago
  You are talking about Word, not the entirety of Office. Excel does not have similar alternatives.