10 ms·

Escape from Microsoft Word

136 points by samclemens 12y ago

tokai 12y ago
TL:DR - Microsoft Word is bad; Wordperfect is (still) nice. No discussion of non-WYSIWYG word processing.
- lstamour 12y ago
  A more precise TL;DR would be "I wrote my document with some parts italicized and then applied margin formatting which removed my italics if less than 50% of the selection was italics, but kept it otherwise." Wordperfect didn't have this "feature," so it's better. Here's a description of the feature with screenshots: http://shaunakelly.com/word/styles/stylesoverridedirectformatting.html http://shaunakelly.com/word/styles/stylesoverridedirectforma... Here's one workaround: http://wordribbon.tips.net/T009594_Retaining_Explicit_Formatting_after_Applying_Styles.html http://wordribbon.tips.net/T009594_Retaining_Explicit_Format... Based on this, I would suggest personally that once you've highlighted all the italics via Find, you could apply a style that's italic (such as "Subtle Emphasis" which looks like non-bold italic by default) which should in turn change the direct formatting to style-based formatting and, in theory, act like WordPerfect did from then on...
  - ygra 12y ago
    A bit strange to call Heading 1 a paragraph style when it's both a paragraph and character style. But then I tried it out with a pure paragraph style and was surprised that it removed direct formatting. Things I never even knew because I never used direct formatting if I could help it. Weird. And it's probably a good idea to continue eschewing direct formatting for that very reason.
  - tokai 12y ago
    Too long, didn't read.
bbayer 12y ago
As a longtime employee of big corporation I am still thinking why we are still using Word. Day to day documentation need doesn't require that big set of features. Even core expectations don't get satisfied and always need support from third party plugins. Other products like requirement analysis tools are built on top of Word which leads more buggy and bloat setup. I think that's because it became an industrial standard that nobody choose to unfollow. I saw some people choose to attach word documents to email instead of pasting actual text to email body. Word will be on stage for a while unless we don't get rid of this mindset.
- userbinator 12y ago
  I've used Word before and I will if I'm required to, but otherwise I prefer to use a text editor and have gotten some strange looks from others for doing that/sending them a document as a plaintext file. I don't understand why people seem to always reach for it even when they're writing short unformatted pieces of text; it's rather overkill for that, and if you've ever seen things like RFCs, it is possible to create some very readably formatted plaintext documents too. If I'm doing something that needs fancy formatting, then my tool of choice if TeX; but I still focus on the content first, and the formatting afterwards.
  - vec 12y ago
    I was curious about this myself recently and a conversation with my wife managed to clarify it a bit for me. She's very technically proficient but is not a hacker. She also uses Word for almost everything, which drives me crazy, but I think I understand why now. To her content and presentation are not separate entities. Font choice, heading size, margins and spacing, and colors are secondary to the text and the document structure, but they're still semantic elements and carry meaning above and beyond the structure they present. Presenting a sentence in red, for example, conveys a different meaning than making the same sentence bold, even if in theory they're simply alternate ways of conveying importance. She judges the extra expressiveness to be worth the extra complexity, even for informal documents and notes to herself.
    - 12y ago
robotgrill 12y ago
Thanks for the article. I think I'll be using Notepad and emacs a little more.
M4v3R 12y ago
The problem is, if you try too hard to mimic the real world example (typewriter in this case), you will end up with some constraints or weird bugs. For example, if the indentation were to be applied on per-line basis, what would happen if you later added some text in the previous line? would just the same amount of words be indented, or would the indented line not change at all, and the excess words pushed to a new line? This is exactly why some things in Word (and other word processors for that matter) are done the way they are done.
rhythmvs 12y ago
A pompous piece by an author who appears to know little of Plato, and less of software design, but nevertheless enjoys concocting absurd analogies like these: "Word’s 50-percent rule for applying styles is a descendent of the Demiurge, and just as much of a kludge."
- quonn 12y ago
  We don't have enough information to know if the author knows much about Plato or not. What he says is not necessarily particularly deep, but it's not wrong either. Generally, I liked the article. What I don't like is the fact that the obvious advantages of the style-model are not mentioned. Most people don't grasp these advantages, which is why they have much more trouble than is necessary - even in Word - when working on a long text (a thesis, say).
dangerlibrary 12y ago
I love the user experience description, here. This is an intelligent user of software describing their mental model of what is going on. It doesn't map cleanly to the discussions about software among software developers, because of course it doesn't, but it's also not just plain wrong or misguided. This is the kind of feedback I would kill for on a product.
- eitally 12y ago
  Agreed. When I wrote my master's thesis, I started by trying to use Google Docs. That lasted about two hours.... Then I tried LibreOffice. That lasted the rest of the first day. Finally I borrowed my wife's Macbook and switched to Word. It remained an exercise in frustration, even to do simple things like set page numbering in the pre-body content (intro, acknowledgements, ToC, etc) to Roman numerals vs Latin numbers in the body, or correctly setting up headers & footers, or matching footnote styling to the department's style guide. As the author states here, all this complex styling crap is a huge distraction from creating content, but because of how Word works, you can't just work in the old mode and leave the styling for the end. It has to be created inline or you're going to have a really bad time trying to fix it later.
  - hackuser 12y ago
    > because of how Word works, you can't just work in the old mode and leave the styling for the end. It has to be created inline or you're going to have a really bad time trying to fix it later. Why not? I don't doubt you, but I've never understood why it happens.
zzalpha 12y ago
"Word’s intellectual model is effectively timeless: you paint the text with its attributes. WordPerfect’s is active and progressive: you change a setting, continue typing, and then change some other setting" Umm... those are the same basic model. WordPerfect's model is simply more primitive markup. The only difference is, unlike a structural document editor, the markup isn't containers, they're just control directives. In essence you "paint" a region of text with a directive by changing a setting, then changing it back. Word fails for a very simple reason: they've shoehorned structural editing functions, with styles and sections and so forth, into an editor that traditionally worked like WordPerfect. The result is a complex mishmash of ad hoc and structural document markup, and you end up with confusing rules in order to reconcile the models. Personally, I prefer LyX: powered by LaTeX, it's purely structural, while providing a rich editing environment with a visual approximation of the output, where the final document is typeset to the desired format. The result is simple and freeing: I concern myself with the content and the structure, let LyX manage the underlying markup, and let the typesetter decide how to lay it out.
- jarcane 12y ago
  His comparison though, and the similarity to how WordPerfect managed things, is precisely why I switched to LyX as well. It's not perfect, but it's a huge step better at getting out of my way and just letting me tell the computer what I want to do, and letting it figure it out from there. I get to "just write," and in the end I still get something that honestly looks more professional than the things I did in Word and LibreOffice, with a fraction of the work and far less fighting the model.
- jvdh 12y ago
  Consider the layout that he applied to the citation sentence, where Word waves a magic wand and leaves some of them italic and some not. The simplicity of WordPerfect and LyX does not do that. The underlying problem is that Word tries to be smart and tries to guess what you are trying to achieve. He argues that most of the times it is wrong. But even if it were right some of the time, it's very annoying when wrong, very hard to correct, and indistinguishable from magic. And I don't want to have some unpredictable tool run on the text that I painstakingly created.
orbifold 12y ago
It's too bad that most people are hopelessly computer illiterate, so that a separation between presentation and content like it is achieved with latex is out of reach for most. Countless hours wasted on adjusting margins, font sizes and filling out chain letter templates in Word.
- titanomachy 12y ago
  Separation between presentation and content is a brilliant concept, but every time I write a document in LaTeX I end up having to do all kinds of fiddly things to make things look right. If your paper doesn't conform to certain constraints you end up dealing with the presentation domain anyway. A very simple example is line breaks in equations: you don't know how much you can fit on a line until you render it, and LaTeX will run your equations off the page instead of wrapping them intelligently. Don't get me wrong, LaTeX is still the best document processor I know of, and I use it all the time. I'm just saying that the "separation of domains" idea is a bit of a fantasy.
  - lomnakkus 12y ago
    > If your paper doesn't conform to certain constraints you end up dealing with the presentation domain anyway. After having read some of Edward Tufte's material, this struck me. I think the main point is: "make it legible" and (Tufte) "as informative as possible". If its not maximally aesthetically pleasing, then so be it. EDIT: I apologize if this is trite, but I think that's really the whole philosophy of (La)TeX.
    - titanomachy 12y ago
      There is truth to this -- I do sometimes get caught up in irrelevant presentation optimizations. But sometimes the default output is clearly "wrong", or even nearly illegible. In the ideal world I have someone else (i.e. a publisher) to think about this stuff for me, but unfortunately that's not usually the case.
- sanderjd 12y ago
  I'm pretty computer literate and I like the idea of separating presentation and content, but I've yet to find a really great implementation of it. HTML/CSS is a mess, and LaTeX is nice but very difficult to use. Markdown seems to be the best, but isn't exactly wonderful. I wouldn't ever try to convince everybody I know to use Markdown for everything instead of Word!
StefanKarpinski 12y ago
I'm annoyed by the author's lack of acknowledgement (and perhaps knowledge) that Word was not a Microsoft product originally. The pre-Microsoft version of Word worked quite differently: it separated meaning and form much better, like good HTML/CSS formatting today does. Although the WYSIWYG MS Word version was nice, I've always missed the clear separation that the non-MS DOS Word had.
- acdha 12y ago
  That's because Word has always been a Microsoft product: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Word#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Word#History
  - StefanKarpinski 12y ago
    Well, that's embarrassing. They certainly didn't emphasize the Microsoft branding in the DOS version in that case.
- FireBeyond 12y ago
  I think perhaps you’re confusing WordPerfect with Word. WP, as a DOS tool, was very big on “show formatting” with a syntax much-like HTML. In that mode, you could actually delete formatting with the backspace key while leaving text intact.
lmg643 12y ago
what a curious piece of writing. it is really interesting to read a liberal arts guy critique software interfaces like a piece of literature. unfortunately, I can't really connect with the critique - too abstract. sometimes, you just need some good screenshots, and captions... The first thing that comes to mind when I read something like this is, usually the issues are a training problem. He clearly knows how to use wordperfect - therefore it is easier. And if you are an author who never does typesetting, then most of MS word is a waste. If you are producing documents that routinely go directly to customers - MS word is a necessity. PDF the document and ship it out... I remember using wordperfect, and I remember when word came along - it was like something from another planet (WYSIWYG). I'm sure you could improve word in many ways, but no one seems to be trying. Google Docs is as much of a clone as i could imagine.
coldtea 12y ago
>This post is about word processors, but I got the idea for it from something W. H. Auden once said about political philosophers. In 1947, talking with his learned young secretary about an anthology he was compiling, The Portable Greek Reader, he mentioned Isocrates, a Greek orator whose simple-seeming ideas about relations between rich and poor cities were sane and practical. Naïve-sounding Isocrates had solved problems for which Plato’s grand theories had no answer. “Isocrates reminds me of John Dewey,” Auden said. “He’s a mediocrity who’s usually right whereas Plato is a man of genius who’s always wrong.” Only a genius could have devised Plato’s theory of the forms—the invisible, intangible “ideas” that give shape to every visible, tangible thing. But the theory of forms is always wrong when applied to political thinking, as every experiment in ideal, utopian politics has proved. This reminds one of the "worse is better" notion. Though, I would point that, just like with "worse is better", nothing of the short has been proved or "permanently settled". It's a common cliche in american political thought to say that "every experiment in ideal, utopian politics" has failed etc, but the reality much more nuanced, and there's much ideology involved in the seemingly "non utopian" politics that's just transparent to their supporters.
shurcooL 12y ago
I'm so glad Markdown exists; it has replaced Word for me.
- cJ0th 12y ago
  And the wonderful thing is that you can use pandoc to turn your markdown files into word documents or pdfs if your audience requires that.
TheMagicHorsey 12y ago
Perhaps this is a non-sequitur, but if you want something like an IDE for writing, Scrivener does a decent job. Its designed to help you marshal research (links, text, media) as well as to organize your writing. Plus it appears to be quite customizable. People have made document templates for screenwriting, research proposals, comicbook scripts, novel writing, etc. Its my preferred tool for longer prose.
- stephenaturner 12y ago
  Finally I'm glad someone mentioned Scrivener here! Very surprised the article didn't even passingly mention it.
  - transpy 12y ago
    I'm downloading the trial. Very intrigued. Thanks!
jasode 12y ago
The author is writing for a non-technical audience so he uses terms like "active & progressive" to describe WordPerfect and "Platonism" to describe Microsoft Word. For the HN crowd, I think it's clearer to explain the difference between WordPerfect vs MSWord as "stream oriented" vs "object containers". See links describing and contrasting the mental models: [1],[2] In other words, WordPerfect formatting was more like HTML inserting <b> and </b> tags to toggle things like bold font on & off. That's why WordPerfect's "reveal codes" was prominently assigned to a function key. MSWord formatting is more analogous to CSS where "styles" and "templates" are more heavily relied on. There is more conceptual separation between text and its formatting. So yes, if you carry WordPefect's mental model into MS Word, it will seem like the software is fighting you. [1]http://word.mvps.org/faqs/general/wordvswordperfect.htm http://word.mvps.org/faqs/general/wordvswordperfect.htm [2]http://wptoolbox.com/tips/MSWordToWP.html http://wptoolbox.com/tips/MSWordToWP.html
- toyg 12y ago
  > MSWord formatting is more analogous to CSS where "styles" and "templates" are more heavily relied on. ... and this model scales much better. Once you assign a style to 250 different headers and you want to change its font, is one change versus 250. This is never addressed by what is, at times, a very erudite UI critique, but unfortunately smells like the usual sour grapes of somebody who refuses to learn new tools.
  - jasode 12y ago
    >, but unfortunately smells like the usual sour grapes of somebody who refuses to learn new tools. To be more charitable, I'd say it's just an issue of the MS Word's mental model not being taught explicity. If you read typical training guides for MS Word, it describes the use of "styles and templates" as "best practices" or "saving time". Instead, the tutorial books should use much stronger language: "You must master styles and templates or you will be perplexed as to why MS Word doesn't do what you want it to do." In defense of the WordPerfect "stream" paradigm, it is more intuitive because you don't have that extra layer of complexity with "styles". As evidence, we see the pendulum swinging back to "simple markdown" that lets people just insert things like bullet points at the exact spot they need it. With MS Word or CSS, you'd (ideally) define a paragraph style or a CSS rule. The 2 paradigms of markdown (streams) vs CSS (styles) will coexist together.
ghshephard 12y ago
I couldn't replicate the behavior he was talking about in Word for Mac 2011. Setting the style on a paragraph, regardless of how much text formatting you've done (I tried approx. 25%,50%, 75%, 90%+) doesn't touch any direct formatting. If you want to clear the direct formatting, and revert to the paragraph style, you have to manually "Clear formatting" from that Paragraph - which is exactly the behavior I would expect. The behavior he described is horrible, and I'm happy that it's not present in my version of Word. (Note, you can ask word to display the styles applied to paragraphs in the left side bar, and also ask it to highlight any place direct formatting has been applied. Very useful when doing style management).
Ollinson 12y ago
I love that the NYRB is getting a lot of play on Hacker News recently. It's really a top tier publication and reminds me a lot of the higher quality conversations on this site.
InclinedPlane 12y ago
Word has outlasted its original functional spec and is now fighting to retain relevancy and usefulness in a much different world. WYSIWYG used to be hugely valuable, making it easy to avoid wasteful reprints of work that didn't look right, or, worse, using an experiment/print/assess model to experimentally get markup right. But that problem has been solved for years, it's no longer interesting, and it's not how people use editors today. Today word docs are not used for print media, often they are the primary form of media transmission or are used for collaboration, uses to which word is almost uniquely poorly suited, but because word is there it's used. Word is horrible for collaboration because it's focused on appearance, not content. Editing in word fails the principle of least surprise and it's generally non-deterministic (you can't see the markup "under" your cursor that will take effect when you start typing or make other changes). Too much effort is spent fighting the tool rather than actually communicating or collaborating. This problem can't be fixed while maintaining word's compatibility with it's previous functionality so it's unlikely ms will fix it any time soon.
radiowave 12y ago
Back when I used to have to deal with word processors a lot, my perception of Word (coming to it from WordPerfect) was that it felt like driving a very sophisticated car, except one that had no brakes - you could always ultimately get it to where you wanted to be, but there was no point along the journey where you actually felt like you were in control. For no particularly good reason, I'm tickled that the author here has such different a metaphor for the same problem.
StartledGoat 12y ago
I still miss Word 5.1. It was simple and straightforward. Wrote a 100k word thesis using it in the mid 90s. On a Mac Classic with 9" greyscale screen (which I still have somewhere).
erkose 12y ago
WordPerfect is still available http://www.wordperfect.com/us/product/office-suite/ http://www.wordperfect.com/us/product/office-suite/

136 points by samclemens 12y ago

tokai 12y ago

TL:DR - Microsoft Word is bad; Wordperfect is (still) nice. No discussion of non-WYSIWYG word processing.

lstamour 12y ago
A more precise TL;DR would be "I wrote my document with some parts italicized and then applied margin formatting which removed my italics if less than 50% of the selection was italics, but kept it otherwise." Wordperfect didn't have this "feature," so it's better. Here's a description of the feature with screenshots: http://shaunakelly.com/word/styles/stylesoverridedirectformatting.html http://shaunakelly.com/word/styles/stylesoverridedirectforma... Here's one workaround: http://wordribbon.tips.net/T009594_Retaining_Explicit_Formatting_after_Applying_Styles.html http://wordribbon.tips.net/T009594_Retaining_Explicit_Format... Based on this, I would suggest personally that once you've highlighted all the italics via Find, you could apply a style that's italic (such as "Subtle Emphasis" which looks like non-bold italic by default) which should in turn change the direct formatting to style-based formatting and, in theory, act like WordPerfect did from then on...
- ygra 12y ago
  A bit strange to call Heading 1 a paragraph style when it's both a paragraph and character style. But then I tried it out with a pure paragraph style and was surprised that it removed direct formatting. Things I never even knew because I never used direct formatting if I could help it. Weird. And it's probably a good idea to continue eschewing direct formatting for that very reason.
- tokai 12y ago
  Too long, didn't read.

bbayer 12y ago

As a longtime employee of big corporation I am still thinking why we are still using Word. Day to day documentation need doesn't require that big set of features. Even core expectations don't get satisfied and always need support from third party plugins. Other products like requirement analysis tools are built on top of Word which leads more buggy and bloat setup. I think that's because it became an industrial standard that nobody choose to unfollow. I saw some people choose to attach word documents to email instead of pasting actual text to email body. Word will be on stage for a while unless we don't get rid of this mindset.

userbinator 12y ago
I've used Word before and I will if I'm required to, but otherwise I prefer to use a text editor and have gotten some strange looks from others for doing that/sending them a document as a plaintext file. I don't understand why people seem to always reach for it even when they're writing short unformatted pieces of text; it's rather overkill for that, and if you've ever seen things like RFCs, it is possible to create some very readably formatted plaintext documents too. If I'm doing something that needs fancy formatting, then my tool of choice if TeX; but I still focus on the content first, and the formatting afterwards.
- vec 12y ago
  I was curious about this myself recently and a conversation with my wife managed to clarify it a bit for me. She's very technically proficient but is not a hacker. She also uses Word for almost everything, which drives me crazy, but I think I understand why now. To her content and presentation are not separate entities. Font choice, heading size, margins and spacing, and colors are secondary to the text and the document structure, but they're still semantic elements and carry meaning above and beyond the structure they present. Presenting a sentence in red, for example, conveys a different meaning than making the same sentence bold, even if in theory they're simply alternate ways of conveying importance. She judges the extra expressiveness to be worth the extra complexity, even for informal documents and notes to herself.
  - 12y ago

robotgrill 12y ago

Thanks for the article. I think I'll be using Notepad and emacs a little more.

M4v3R 12y ago

The problem is, if you try too hard to mimic the real world example (typewriter in this case), you will end up with some constraints or weird bugs. For example, if the indentation were to be applied on per-line basis, what would happen if you later added some text in the previous line? would just the same amount of words be indented, or would the indented line not change at all, and the excess words pushed to a new line? This is exactly why some things in Word (and other word processors for that matter) are done the way they are done.

rhythmvs 12y ago

A pompous piece by an author who appears to know little of Plato, and less of software design, but nevertheless enjoys concocting absurd analogies like these: "Word’s 50-percent rule for applying styles is a descendent of the Demiurge, and just as much of a kludge."

quonn 12y ago
We don't have enough information to know if the author knows much about Plato or not. What he says is not necessarily particularly deep, but it's not wrong either. Generally, I liked the article. What I don't like is the fact that the obvious advantages of the style-model are not mentioned. Most people don't grasp these advantages, which is why they have much more trouble than is necessary - even in Word - when working on a long text (a thesis, say).

dangerlibrary 12y ago

I love the user experience description, here. This is an intelligent user of software describing their mental model of what is going on. It doesn't map cleanly to the discussions about software among software developers, because of course it doesn't, but it's also not just plain wrong or misguided. This is the kind of feedback I would kill for on a product.

eitally 12y ago
Agreed. When I wrote my master's thesis, I started by trying to use Google Docs. That lasted about two hours.... Then I tried LibreOffice. That lasted the rest of the first day. Finally I borrowed my wife's Macbook and switched to Word. It remained an exercise in frustration, even to do simple things like set page numbering in the pre-body content (intro, acknowledgements, ToC, etc) to Roman numerals vs Latin numbers in the body, or correctly setting up headers & footers, or matching footnote styling to the department's style guide. As the author states here, all this complex styling crap is a huge distraction from creating content, but because of how Word works, you can't just work in the old mode and leave the styling for the end. It has to be created inline or you're going to have a really bad time trying to fix it later.
- hackuser 12y ago
  > because of how Word works, you can't just work in the old mode and leave the styling for the end. It has to be created inline or you're going to have a really bad time trying to fix it later. Why not? I don't doubt you, but I've never understood why it happens.

zzalpha 12y ago

"Word’s intellectual model is effectively timeless: you paint the text with its attributes. WordPerfect’s is active and progressive: you change a setting, continue typing, and then change some other setting" Umm... those are the same basic model. WordPerfect's model is simply more primitive markup. The only difference is, unlike a structural document editor, the markup isn't containers, they're just control directives. In essence you "paint" a region of text with a directive by changing a setting, then changing it back. Word fails for a very simple reason: they've shoehorned structural editing functions, with styles and sections and so forth, into an editor that traditionally worked like WordPerfect. The result is a complex mishmash of ad hoc and structural document markup, and you end up with confusing rules in order to reconcile the models. Personally, I prefer LyX: powered by LaTeX, it's purely structural, while providing a rich editing environment with a visual approximation of the output, where the final document is typeset to the desired format. The result is simple and freeing: I concern myself with the content and the structure, let LyX manage the underlying markup, and let the typesetter decide how to lay it out.

jarcane 12y ago
His comparison though, and the similarity to how WordPerfect managed things, is precisely why I switched to LyX as well. It's not perfect, but it's a huge step better at getting out of my way and just letting me tell the computer what I want to do, and letting it figure it out from there. I get to "just write," and in the end I still get something that honestly looks more professional than the things I did in Word and LibreOffice, with a fraction of the work and far less fighting the model.
jvdh 12y ago
Consider the layout that he applied to the citation sentence, where Word waves a magic wand and leaves some of them italic and some not. The simplicity of WordPerfect and LyX does not do that. The underlying problem is that Word tries to be smart and tries to guess what you are trying to achieve. He argues that most of the times it is wrong. But even if it were right some of the time, it's very annoying when wrong, very hard to correct, and indistinguishable from magic. And I don't want to have some unpredictable tool run on the text that I painstakingly created.

orbifold 12y ago

It's too bad that most people are hopelessly computer illiterate, so that a separation between presentation and content like it is achieved with latex is out of reach for most. Countless hours wasted on adjusting margins, font sizes and filling out chain letter templates in Word.

titanomachy 12y ago
Separation between presentation and content is a brilliant concept, but every time I write a document in LaTeX I end up having to do all kinds of fiddly things to make things look right. If your paper doesn't conform to certain constraints you end up dealing with the presentation domain anyway. A very simple example is line breaks in equations: you don't know how much you can fit on a line until you render it, and LaTeX will run your equations off the page instead of wrapping them intelligently. Don't get me wrong, LaTeX is still the best document processor I know of, and I use it all the time. I'm just saying that the "separation of domains" idea is a bit of a fantasy.
- lomnakkus 12y ago
  > If your paper doesn't conform to certain constraints you end up dealing with the presentation domain anyway. After having read some of Edward Tufte's material, this struck me. I think the main point is: "make it legible" and (Tufte) "as informative as possible". If its not maximally aesthetically pleasing, then so be it. EDIT: I apologize if this is trite, but I think that's really the whole philosophy of (La)TeX.
  - titanomachy 12y ago
    There is truth to this -- I do sometimes get caught up in irrelevant presentation optimizations. But sometimes the default output is clearly "wrong", or even nearly illegible. In the ideal world I have someone else (i.e. a publisher) to think about this stuff for me, but unfortunately that's not usually the case.
sanderjd 12y ago
I'm pretty computer literate and I like the idea of separating presentation and content, but I've yet to find a really great implementation of it. HTML/CSS is a mess, and LaTeX is nice but very difficult to use. Markdown seems to be the best, but isn't exactly wonderful. I wouldn't ever try to convince everybody I know to use Markdown for everything instead of Word!

StefanKarpinski 12y ago

I'm annoyed by the author's lack of acknowledgement (and perhaps knowledge) that Word was not a Microsoft product originally. The pre-Microsoft version of Word worked quite differently: it separated meaning and form much better, like good HTML/CSS formatting today does. Although the WYSIWYG MS Word version was nice, I've always missed the clear separation that the non-MS DOS Word had.

acdha 12y ago
That's because Word has always been a Microsoft product: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Word#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Word#History
- StefanKarpinski 12y ago
  Well, that's embarrassing. They certainly didn't emphasize the Microsoft branding in the DOS version in that case.
FireBeyond 12y ago
I think perhaps you’re confusing WordPerfect with Word. WP, as a DOS tool, was very big on “show formatting” with a syntax much-like HTML. In that mode, you could actually delete formatting with the backspace key while leaving text intact.

lmg643 12y ago

what a curious piece of writing. it is really interesting to read a liberal arts guy critique software interfaces like a piece of literature. unfortunately, I can't really connect with the critique - too abstract. sometimes, you just need some good screenshots, and captions... The first thing that comes to mind when I read something like this is, usually the issues are a training problem. He clearly knows how to use wordperfect - therefore it is easier. And if you are an author who never does typesetting, then most of MS word is a waste. If you are producing documents that routinely go directly to customers - MS word is a necessity. PDF the document and ship it out... I remember using wordperfect, and I remember when word came along - it was like something from another planet (WYSIWYG). I'm sure you could improve word in many ways, but no one seems to be trying. Google Docs is as much of a clone as i could imagine.

coldtea 12y ago

>This post is about word processors, but I got the idea for it from something W. H. Auden once said about political philosophers. In 1947, talking with his learned young secretary about an anthology he was compiling, The Portable Greek Reader, he mentioned Isocrates, a Greek orator whose simple-seeming ideas about relations between rich and poor cities were sane and practical. Naïve-sounding Isocrates had solved problems for which Plato’s grand theories had no answer. “Isocrates reminds me of John Dewey,” Auden said. “He’s a mediocrity who’s usually right whereas Plato is a man of genius who’s always wrong.” Only a genius could have devised Plato’s theory of the forms—the invisible, intangible “ideas” that give shape to every visible, tangible thing. But the theory of forms is always wrong when applied to political thinking, as every experiment in ideal, utopian politics has proved. This reminds one of the "worse is better" notion. Though, I would point that, just like with "worse is better", nothing of the short has been proved or "permanently settled". It's a common cliche in american political thought to say that "every experiment in ideal, utopian politics" has failed etc, but the reality much more nuanced, and there's much ideology involved in the seemingly "non utopian" politics that's just transparent to their supporters.

shurcooL 12y ago

I'm so glad Markdown exists; it has replaced Word for me.

cJ0th 12y ago
And the wonderful thing is that you can use pandoc to turn your markdown files into word documents or pdfs if your audience requires that.

TheMagicHorsey 12y ago

Perhaps this is a non-sequitur, but if you want something like an IDE for writing, Scrivener does a decent job. Its designed to help you marshal research (links, text, media) as well as to organize your writing. Plus it appears to be quite customizable. People have made document templates for screenwriting, research proposals, comicbook scripts, novel writing, etc. Its my preferred tool for longer prose.

stephenaturner 12y ago
Finally I'm glad someone mentioned Scrivener here! Very surprised the article didn't even passingly mention it.
- transpy 12y ago
  I'm downloading the trial. Very intrigued. Thanks!

jasode 12y ago

The author is writing for a non-technical audience so he uses terms like "active & progressive" to describe WordPerfect and "Platonism" to describe Microsoft Word. For the HN crowd, I think it's clearer to explain the difference between WordPerfect vs MSWord as "stream oriented" vs "object containers". See links describing and contrasting the mental models: [1],[2] In other words, WordPerfect formatting was more like HTML inserting <b> and </b> tags to toggle things like bold font on & off. That's why WordPerfect's "reveal codes" was prominently assigned to a function key. MSWord formatting is more analogous to CSS where "styles" and "templates" are more heavily relied on. There is more conceptual separation between text and its formatting. So yes, if you carry WordPefect's mental model into MS Word, it will seem like the software is fighting you. [1]http://word.mvps.org/faqs/general/wordvswordperfect.htm http://word.mvps.org/faqs/general/wordvswordperfect.htm [2]http://wptoolbox.com/tips/MSWordToWP.html http://wptoolbox.com/tips/MSWordToWP.html

toyg 12y ago
> MSWord formatting is more analogous to CSS where "styles" and "templates" are more heavily relied on. ... and this model scales much better. Once you assign a style to 250 different headers and you want to change its font, is one change versus 250. This is never addressed by what is, at times, a very erudite UI critique, but unfortunately smells like the usual sour grapes of somebody who refuses to learn new tools.
- jasode 12y ago
  >, but unfortunately smells like the usual sour grapes of somebody who refuses to learn new tools. To be more charitable, I'd say it's just an issue of the MS Word's mental model not being taught explicity. If you read typical training guides for MS Word, it describes the use of "styles and templates" as "best practices" or "saving time". Instead, the tutorial books should use much stronger language: "You must master styles and templates or you will be perplexed as to why MS Word doesn't do what you want it to do." In defense of the WordPerfect "stream" paradigm, it is more intuitive because you don't have that extra layer of complexity with "styles". As evidence, we see the pendulum swinging back to "simple markdown" that lets people just insert things like bullet points at the exact spot they need it. With MS Word or CSS, you'd (ideally) define a paragraph style or a CSS rule. The 2 paradigms of markdown (streams) vs CSS (styles) will coexist together.

ghshephard 12y ago

I couldn't replicate the behavior he was talking about in Word for Mac 2011. Setting the style on a paragraph, regardless of how much text formatting you've done (I tried approx. 25%,50%, 75%, 90%+) doesn't touch any direct formatting. If you want to clear the direct formatting, and revert to the paragraph style, you have to manually "Clear formatting" from that Paragraph - which is exactly the behavior I would expect. The behavior he described is horrible, and I'm happy that it's not present in my version of Word. (Note, you can ask word to display the styles applied to paragraphs in the left side bar, and also ask it to highlight any place direct formatting has been applied. Very useful when doing style management).

Ollinson 12y ago

I love that the NYRB is getting a lot of play on Hacker News recently. It's really a top tier publication and reminds me a lot of the higher quality conversations on this site.

InclinedPlane 12y ago

Word has outlasted its original functional spec and is now fighting to retain relevancy and usefulness in a much different world. WYSIWYG used to be hugely valuable, making it easy to avoid wasteful reprints of work that didn't look right, or, worse, using an experiment/print/assess model to experimentally get markup right. But that problem has been solved for years, it's no longer interesting, and it's not how people use editors today. Today word docs are not used for print media, often they are the primary form of media transmission or are used for collaboration, uses to which word is almost uniquely poorly suited, but because word is there it's used. Word is horrible for collaboration because it's focused on appearance, not content. Editing in word fails the principle of least surprise and it's generally non-deterministic (you can't see the markup "under" your cursor that will take effect when you start typing or make other changes). Too much effort is spent fighting the tool rather than actually communicating or collaborating. This problem can't be fixed while maintaining word's compatibility with it's previous functionality so it's unlikely ms will fix it any time soon.

radiowave 12y ago

Back when I used to have to deal with word processors a lot, my perception of Word (coming to it from WordPerfect) was that it felt like driving a very sophisticated car, except one that had no brakes - you could always ultimately get it to where you wanted to be, but there was no point along the journey where you actually felt like you were in control. For no particularly good reason, I'm tickled that the author here has such different a metaphor for the same problem.

StartledGoat 12y ago

I still miss Word 5.1. It was simple and straightforward. Wrote a 100k word thesis using it in the mid 90s. On a Mac Classic with 9" greyscale screen (which I still have somewhere).

erkose 12y ago

WordPerfect is still available http://www.wordperfect.com/us/product/office-suite/ http://www.wordperfect.com/us/product/office-suite/