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I don't have a deep personal affectation for WordStar, although I do appreciate it's keyboard layout, but what I do miss is writers having opinions about these
by mhd 6y ago
I don't have a deep personal affectation for WordStar, although I do appreciate it's keyboard layout, but what I do miss is writers having opinions about these things.
These days it seems that it's mostly "whatever version of Word that came with my Laptop/Times New Roman 12".
We programmers still have our "holy wars" (although I see a decrease of passion here, too, with safe choices like VSC or IntelliJ being more and more the default.)
But back in the days, even writers with non-CS backgrounds could wax poetic about XyWrite vs. WordStar vs. Word (DOS/Win/Mac) vs WordPerfect. (Heck, WordPerfect even made lawyers have an opinion of their own)
- bonaldi 6y agoThose debates continue - to Scrivener or not to Scrivener is quite the topic with long-form writers. And Final Draft is heavily discussed. But the reason the debate is dying out is because the competition is dying out: Word won. And that doesn’t mean the app, it means all the Simonyi-type ways of thinking it brings with it: paragraph-level formatting with overrides, single frame with embeds, no visible codes beyond P-marks, output-dependent page definition, local fonts, etc. It’s like if all editors were just vi variants and nobody was trying anything else any longer. Which is a damn shame, because there are an awful lot of alternative approaches to rich document creation that could be explored, especially now the printed page is probably the least important part of things, but developers don’t care (plain text obsessives, usually) and the industry doesn’t (because competing with Word and GDocs doesn’t make you rich). Instead what action there would be in the space has moved to things like Notion. Which is great for note-takers, less so for writers.
- zmix 6y ago> Those debates continue - to Scrivener or not to Scrivener is quite the topic with long-form writers. And Final Draft is heavily discussed. Where could I find such discussions? Do you remember any links?
- tablespoon 6y ago> WordPerfect. (Heck, WordPerfect even made lawyers have an opinion of their own) IIRC, WordPerfect is only still a thing because Word still does not do footnotes the way lawyers like (and courts require).
- agumonkey 6y agoOh, french court room I helped last summer does indeed use WordPerfect 12 .. it might very well be due to this sort of arguments.
- paultopia 6y agoIt's much more than footnotes. Courts have a lot of very picky formatting requirements, plus lawyers care a lot about presentation. Reveal codes is the thing about WordPerfect that lawyers love the most, because it gives you fine grained control over that stuff on a character/word level without having to pray to the Word Styles god.
- goatinaboat 6y agoCourts have a lot of very picky formatting requirements, plus lawyers care a lot about presentation Someone said once, a legal contract is a program that you run on a judge. So the formatting is as important as it is in a whitespace-sensitive language like Python.
- lostgame 6y agoAlso, at least here in Canada, it has a huge place in the education market, I believe in part due to a deal with the school systems.
- kayodelycaon 6y agoI’m in a couple of chats with writers. There are constant discussions about tools: Google Docs, Word, Apple Pages, Scrivener, and even vim with markdown and git. We all have different tools and different ways of writing. We’ve shared photos of our workspaces. A lot of this doesn’t happen in public anymore because we’ve moved to chat programs like Telegram and Discord.