5 ms·

What is so great about it that it can be considered 'superior' to software suits from MS or Gulugulu?

cout 5y ago
Two words: Reveal Codes. Have you ever moved your cursor and started typing, only to find out that suddenly you were typing in BOLD? That's due to some bold code left behind from earlier in the edit. In WordPerfect you could press F11 to Reveal all the Codes, delete the bold code, and move on with your day.
- alyandon 5y ago
  Yep, I continued to use an old copy of WP for years because of reveal codes until I was forced to move to Microsoft Word.
  - cout 5y ago
    Though it lacks Reveal Codes, I can tolerate older versions of Word, but when they added the ribbon I was completely confused. Give me a keyboard template and function keys any day over a hodgepodge of nonsensical icons with no obvious organization.
    - bombcar 5y ago
      The Mac version of Office remains superior as it still has the menu bar along with the ribbon.
    - kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
      Word 2003 still works and has an update available to support modern OOXML docs. My biggest gripe is the way Ribbonized Word has destroyed the classic Normal layout view and made Draft mode less capable.
    - pstuart 5y ago
      Word 4 on the Mac rocked.
      - lproven 5y ago
        Hi. Article author here. Most people – me included – reckoned that Word 5.1 for the Mac was the last, best version. If you grab the ShapeShifter VM that I describe and link to in the blog post, and look in the MS Word folder, you may be in for a very pleasant surprise. :-)
        pstuart 5y ago
        It's been so long and I've been wrong before. I'll try to remember to check it out...
- fortran77 5y ago
  In word "shift f1" then check "reveal formatting marks"
  - cout 5y ago
    Thank you, I forgot Word had that feature. If I remember correctly, it's not nearly as powerful as Reveal Codes -- it's like setting :li in vim to see whitespace marks. Reveal Codes shows you _all_ the codes (imagine HTML or SGML but with square brackets).
    - sigzero 5y ago
      You remember rightly.
  - 1ris 5y ago
    A completely different feature. In word this should be called "reveal spaces and line breaks". In WordPerfect this is activating a TeX mode in addition to your WYSIWYG. You have two buffers, with two coursers, that stay in sync. Maybe the closes analogy is a jupyter notepad for tex? But fast. I have never seen anything like this, althou LyX offers one mode that is kind of a mix of both of them.
- pmiller2 5y ago
  Damn, you beat me to it. Reveal codes is the ultimate hammer against screwy formatting. No more wondering why your layout went screwy 10 pages away from where you made some minor change to your text, a graphic, or a table. With "reveal codes" available, you can see directly what's going on and fix it right, instead of fumbling about with the formatting tools in Word.
- chipotle_coyote 5y ago
  I think this is part of the appeal of Markdown-based editors. The nicer ones can make the text look good both while typing and when exporting, but there's little to no hidden magic. WordPerfect, XyWrite/Nota Bene, and WordStar had -- and still have -- fans who insist that they were unparalleled at "just sit down and write"; good Markdown editors bring a lot of that back. (And no, Markdown isn't, on its own, a replacement for a full-blown word processor, LaTeX, or the like. Many classes of documents just aren't that complicated, though.)
  - cout 5y ago
    That's a great point. I often do writing in markdown format using vim. I really wanted to like LaTeX for writing, but I kept having to look up how to use it.
    - chipotle_coyote 5y ago
      I've typeset a couple books with LaTeX, but I wrote them in other things and did conversion after the fact using Pandoc. :)
  - andi999 5y ago
    Can you name a good markdown editor?
    - chipotle_coyote 5y ago
      Yes, although I've found these tend to be apps people have strong opinions about. :) Currently, I use Ulysses for big documents (like multi-chapter stories) as well as for blog posts, since it can publish directly to WordPress, Ghost, Micro.blog, and Medium. It's a little idiosyncratic, and it's for Mac, iOS only. A very similar app that's for Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android is iA Writer. It's also idiosyncratic, but has slightly different pluses and minuses. I used it before Ulysses, though, and might yet go back. For shorter stuff I tend to write in Drafts, although that's another Mac/iOS thing. Since I'm obviously a Mac user, I don't know a lot about what's available on Linux other than code editors, which personally I haven't found that I like as much for prose. Definitely a YMMV thing. Sublime Text and Visual Studio Code both have decent Markdown modes and have various extensions to do interesting things, though, like Markdown linting. Emacs and Vim both actually have great Markdown modes, too, but I just don't like either one for prose.
- mananaysiempre 5y ago
  One of unresolved questions of rich text in my mind is what to do with these markup “codes”, explicit or hidden, because while the (usually) nested open/close structure is a non-terrible way for describing formatting in plain text, it is IMO a completely unnatural model (mental or programmatic) of describing rich text by itself, not backed by marked-up plain text. This is apparent in abstraction leaks like the one you describe, but it also has a way of making your life really miserable as soon as you want to reason about transformations of documents, like in a collaborative editor or just a HTML-based editor. In fact, both Google Wave (IIRC, not going to look up the reference right now) and the Medium editor (https://medium.engineering/why-contenteditable-is-terrible-122d8a40e480 https://medium.engineering/why-contenteditable-is-terrible-1...) represent inline formatting as a bucket of non-nested “spans”, because while this still doesn’t yield a unique representation of what you want to call rich text, it gets much easier to pick a canonical representative for each class of equivalent representations that doesn’t get completely upturned by localized editing operations. Even the text editor example in the GoF book just assigned each character a (shared, CoW) style object... Does anyone actually do it this way?
  - geocar 5y ago
    > Even the text editor example in the GoF book just assigned each character a (shared, CoW) style object... Does anyone actually do it this way? Emacs does. It has something called "text properties" https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/TextProperties#text_property https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/TextProperties#text_property Colorforth also works this way. https://colorforth.github.io/parsed.html https://colorforth.github.io/parsed.html The complication arises when you insert text: Users generally prefer to insert a letter between two bold characters and have the word processor "assume" the user meant to type boldface, rather than push a button to put the insert-function into "create bold letters" mode.
- npteljes 5y ago
  Fantastic feature and it's hard for me to believe how it's missed in all the other editors. Somehow, there must be an underlying structure to store all that formatting - so it's strange that there isn't some way to at least have a look at it.
  - kcartlidge 5y ago
    The WordPerfect file format is basically a long stream of bytes representing the text, with special control codes inserted for switching various features on and off. In other words (IIRC) reveal codes was made possible largely because the file system representation matched what you saw on screen, so it was easy to keep the visual representation in sync with the file. In Word (certainly now and I think back then as well) it wasn't that way - the file was structured so there was a mis-match between the screen and the file, so keeping the two aspects in sync became more difficult as the in-memory representation was correspondingly structured rather than sequential.
    - npteljes 5y ago
      I'm sure if I knew how it's represented, I wouldn't think of it as something simple.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

cout 5y ago

Two words: Reveal Codes. Have you ever moved your cursor and started typing, only to find out that suddenly you were typing in BOLD? That's due to some bold code left behind from earlier in the edit. In WordPerfect you could press F11 to Reveal all the Codes, delete the bold code, and move on with your day.

alyandon 5y ago
Yep, I continued to use an old copy of WP for years because of reveal codes until I was forced to move to Microsoft Word.
- cout 5y ago
  Though it lacks Reveal Codes, I can tolerate older versions of Word, but when they added the ribbon I was completely confused. Give me a keyboard template and function keys any day over a hodgepodge of nonsensical icons with no obvious organization.
  - bombcar 5y ago
    The Mac version of Office remains superior as it still has the menu bar along with the ribbon.
  - kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
    Word 2003 still works and has an update available to support modern OOXML docs. My biggest gripe is the way Ribbonized Word has destroyed the classic Normal layout view and made Draft mode less capable.
  - pstuart 5y ago
    Word 4 on the Mac rocked.
    - lproven 5y ago
      Hi. Article author here. Most people – me included – reckoned that Word 5.1 for the Mac was the last, best version. If you grab the ShapeShifter VM that I describe and link to in the blog post, and look in the MS Word folder, you may be in for a very pleasant surprise. :-)
      - pstuart 5y ago
        It's been so long and I've been wrong before. I'll try to remember to check it out...
fortran77 5y ago
In word "shift f1" then check "reveal formatting marks"
- cout 5y ago
  Thank you, I forgot Word had that feature. If I remember correctly, it's not nearly as powerful as Reveal Codes -- it's like setting :li in vim to see whitespace marks. Reveal Codes shows you _all_ the codes (imagine HTML or SGML but with square brackets).
  - sigzero 5y ago
    You remember rightly.
- 1ris 5y ago
  A completely different feature. In word this should be called "reveal spaces and line breaks". In WordPerfect this is activating a TeX mode in addition to your WYSIWYG. You have two buffers, with two coursers, that stay in sync. Maybe the closes analogy is a jupyter notepad for tex? But fast. I have never seen anything like this, althou LyX offers one mode that is kind of a mix of both of them.
pmiller2 5y ago
Damn, you beat me to it. Reveal codes is the ultimate hammer against screwy formatting. No more wondering why your layout went screwy 10 pages away from where you made some minor change to your text, a graphic, or a table. With "reveal codes" available, you can see directly what's going on and fix it right, instead of fumbling about with the formatting tools in Word.
chipotle_coyote 5y ago
I think this is part of the appeal of Markdown-based editors. The nicer ones can make the text look good both while typing and when exporting, but there's little to no hidden magic. WordPerfect, XyWrite/Nota Bene, and WordStar had -- and still have -- fans who insist that they were unparalleled at "just sit down and write"; good Markdown editors bring a lot of that back. (And no, Markdown isn't, on its own, a replacement for a full-blown word processor, LaTeX, or the like. Many classes of documents just aren't that complicated, though.)
- cout 5y ago
  That's a great point. I often do writing in markdown format using vim. I really wanted to like LaTeX for writing, but I kept having to look up how to use it.
  - chipotle_coyote 5y ago
    I've typeset a couple books with LaTeX, but I wrote them in other things and did conversion after the fact using Pandoc. :)
- andi999 5y ago
  Can you name a good markdown editor?
  - chipotle_coyote 5y ago
    Yes, although I've found these tend to be apps people have strong opinions about. :) Currently, I use Ulysses for big documents (like multi-chapter stories) as well as for blog posts, since it can publish directly to WordPress, Ghost, Micro.blog, and Medium. It's a little idiosyncratic, and it's for Mac, iOS only. A very similar app that's for Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android is iA Writer. It's also idiosyncratic, but has slightly different pluses and minuses. I used it before Ulysses, though, and might yet go back. For shorter stuff I tend to write in Drafts, although that's another Mac/iOS thing. Since I'm obviously a Mac user, I don't know a lot about what's available on Linux other than code editors, which personally I haven't found that I like as much for prose. Definitely a YMMV thing. Sublime Text and Visual Studio Code both have decent Markdown modes and have various extensions to do interesting things, though, like Markdown linting. Emacs and Vim both actually have great Markdown modes, too, but I just don't like either one for prose.
mananaysiempre 5y ago
One of unresolved questions of rich text in my mind is what to do with these markup “codes”, explicit or hidden, because while the (usually) nested open/close structure is a non-terrible way for describing formatting in plain text, it is IMO a completely unnatural model (mental or programmatic) of describing rich text by itself, not backed by marked-up plain text. This is apparent in abstraction leaks like the one you describe, but it also has a way of making your life really miserable as soon as you want to reason about transformations of documents, like in a collaborative editor or just a HTML-based editor. In fact, both Google Wave (IIRC, not going to look up the reference right now) and the Medium editor (https://medium.engineering/why-contenteditable-is-terrible-122d8a40e480 https://medium.engineering/why-contenteditable-is-terrible-1...) represent inline formatting as a bucket of non-nested “spans”, because while this still doesn’t yield a unique representation of what you want to call rich text, it gets much easier to pick a canonical representative for each class of equivalent representations that doesn’t get completely upturned by localized editing operations. Even the text editor example in the GoF book just assigned each character a (shared, CoW) style object... Does anyone actually do it this way?
- geocar 5y ago
  > Even the text editor example in the GoF book just assigned each character a (shared, CoW) style object... Does anyone actually do it this way? Emacs does. It has something called "text properties" https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/TextProperties#text_property https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/TextProperties#text_property Colorforth also works this way. https://colorforth.github.io/parsed.html https://colorforth.github.io/parsed.html The complication arises when you insert text: Users generally prefer to insert a letter between two bold characters and have the word processor "assume" the user meant to type boldface, rather than push a button to put the insert-function into "create bold letters" mode.
npteljes 5y ago
Fantastic feature and it's hard for me to believe how it's missed in all the other editors. Somehow, there must be an underlying structure to store all that formatting - so it's strange that there isn't some way to at least have a look at it.
- kcartlidge 5y ago
  The WordPerfect file format is basically a long stream of bytes representing the text, with special control codes inserted for switching various features on and off. In other words (IIRC) reveal codes was made possible largely because the file system representation matched what you saw on screen, so it was easy to keep the visual representation in sync with the file. In Word (certainly now and I think back then as well) it wasn't that way - the file was structured so there was a mis-match between the screen and the file, so keeping the two aspects in sync became more difficult as the in-memory representation was correspondingly structured rather than sequential.
  - npteljes 5y ago
    I'm sure if I knew how it's represented, I wouldn't think of it as something simple.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]