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>To help others you know DeGoogle their life is a public service Half of the recommended alternatives are not even alternatives, like recommending TeX/LaTeX as

>To help others you know DeGoogle their life is a public service Half of the recommended alternatives are not even alternatives, like recommending TeX/LaTeX as a Docs recplacement. It's just a no go. I know the intentions are good but that's not gonna work for the regular userbase outside of the HN and adjacent circles. >It's an open-source (and offline) document processor using TeX/LaTeX. It's different than Docs or Word but amazing, once you get used to it.

vouaobrasil 3y ago
Well, sending LibreOffice documents back and forth is not too bad. Yes, it's not a real-time collaboration but it works surprisingly well if both parties are open minded enough to go back to a slower workflow. Apple with iCloud also has some basic collaboration features for pages. Yes, Google docs has become dominant and people use it because it's there. But we'd definitely get along fine without it too.
- ghaff 3y ago
  I sent documents around at work for many years. It's awful in general compared to collaborative document editing and I would absolutely hate to go back to using LibreOffice (or Microsoft) presentation or word documents for most purposes. Perhaps I did more of it than you have but collaborative document editing is a huge upgrade.
  - vouaobrasil 3y ago
    I get that. I would love it if LibreOffice had some sort of feature. Maybe it could even be integrated into some kind of open chat protocol like Matrix...
retrac 3y ago
For what it's worth, it's a suggestion for LyX [1], not TeX. Lyx uses TeX/LaTeX, but you don't need to know TeX to use Lyx, anymore than you need to know how to use Microsoft Word with the control codes visible, to use Word. It's a powerful feature underneath you can drop into, but they are both GUI document editors. I would not recommend Lyx as a replacement for Microsoft Word if it's just a simple one-page letter. But it's quite a good suggestion for an alternative if you are writing a book or an academic paper. It has features to support citations, tables of contents etc., maybe better than Word does in some cases. (I've loved and used Lyx for two decades now, so I just had to defend it here, sorry.) [1] https://www.lyx.org/ https://www.lyx.org/
- haunter 3y ago
  >but you don't need to know TeX to use Lyx, anymore than you need to know how to use Microsoft Word Did you know it takes 6 clicks with a dropdown menu and a window involved to set a piece of text selection bold in Lyx? Tells a lot, and not in a good way, that some people totally think and believe that this is comparable to Docs, Word, LibreOffice etc.

vouaobrasil 3y ago

Well, sending LibreOffice documents back and forth is not too bad. Yes, it's not a real-time collaboration but it works surprisingly well if both parties are open minded enough to go back to a slower workflow. Apple with iCloud also has some basic collaboration features for pages. Yes, Google docs has become dominant and people use it because it's there. But we'd definitely get along fine without it too.

ghaff 3y ago
I sent documents around at work for many years. It's awful in general compared to collaborative document editing and I would absolutely hate to go back to using LibreOffice (or Microsoft) presentation or word documents for most purposes. Perhaps I did more of it than you have but collaborative document editing is a huge upgrade.
- vouaobrasil 3y ago
  I get that. I would love it if LibreOffice had some sort of feature. Maybe it could even be integrated into some kind of open chat protocol like Matrix...

retrac 3y ago

For what it's worth, it's a suggestion for LyX [1], not TeX. Lyx uses TeX/LaTeX, but you don't need to know TeX to use Lyx, anymore than you need to know how to use Microsoft Word with the control codes visible, to use Word. It's a powerful feature underneath you can drop into, but they are both GUI document editors. I would not recommend Lyx as a replacement for Microsoft Word if it's just a simple one-page letter. But it's quite a good suggestion for an alternative if you are writing a book or an academic paper. It has features to support citations, tables of contents etc., maybe better than Word does in some cases. (I've loved and used Lyx for two decades now, so I just had to defend it here, sorry.) [1] https://www.lyx.org/ https://www.lyx.org/

haunter 3y ago
>but you don't need to know TeX to use Lyx, anymore than you need to know how to use Microsoft Word Did you know it takes 6 clicks with a dropdown menu and a window involved to set a piece of text selection bold in Lyx? Tells a lot, and not in a good way, that some people totally think and believe that this is comparable to Docs, Word, LibreOffice etc.