Charlie Stross: Why Microsoft Word Must Die 479
Jeremiah Cornelius writes "Rapture of the Nerds co-author Charlie Stross hates Microsoft Word, worse than you do. Best of all, he can articulate the many structural faults of Word that make his loathing both understandable and contagious. 'Steve Jobs approached Bill Gates... to organize the first true WYSIWYG word processor for a personal computer -- ...should it use control codes, or hierarchical style sheets? In the end, the decree went out: Word should implement both formatting paradigms. Even though they're fundamentally incompatible... Word was in fact broken by design, from the outset — and it only got worse from there.' Can Free Software do any better, than to imitate the broken Microsoft model? Does document formatting even matter this much, versus content?"
Re:LaTeX! (Score:5, Informative)
It's called Lyx - http://www.lyx.org/ [lyx.org]
LibreOffice Write is excellent... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Long live TeX and LaTeX (Score:2, Informative)
"TeX is horrible in the sense that it's a glorified macro processor state machine..." ...and it shares this trait with every other system intended to be compiled.
Of course, there's the TeX engine and the default macro packages which are different things. Different front ends could have different behaviors. You are not bound to plain TeX or LaTeX or a few others, write your own. You obviously feel confident of your expertise.
"Remind me, why do we have computers again? To automate stuff? I thought so."
Apparently you need to be reminded. TeX is a system for "automating stuff", not a system for interactively enabling tweaks by hand. The problem you cite comes from your desire to do stupid things.
Re:Here's the real problem he has (Score:5, Informative)
Well, I think the reason for this has to do with Word's commenting and revision tracking features, which are convenient as the document is passed around amongst the publisher's editorial staff.
I used to write fiction using reStructuredText and a literate programming tool. I had a convenient toolchain set up where I could tangle different kinds of documents (outline, chapter, synopsis, alternative scenes) into reStructuredText documents, then convert those into HTML or PDF if plain text wouldn't do. It was a sweet system that didn't get in my way by making me think about formatting (until it was time to generate a manuscript), wasn't subject to file corruption issues, and played well with source control. It met my needs.
The problem was that it didn't meet the needs of the people I had to collaborate with. Everyone in my writer's group wanted ".doc" files, wanted to return their comments and revision suggestion in ".doc" files too.
I suspect the reason his publisher wants ".doc" is that they use it just this way, to pass manuscripts around with comments and revisions neatly packaged into a single file. There are other ways of doing this, of course, but then you have to consider that they've got to get *all* their authors to use the same format, or figure out how to convert whatever formats they might receive into word. It's easiest for many to go with "Give me a word file and I'll return a word file."
For me, formatting didn't matter at all. I've also tried Lyx; I wasn't particularly enamored of it, since I didn't need to write equations or things that had to semantically marked up. All I needed was words on the page, and since I always ended up sending and receiving ".doc" files, I just went to OpenOffice, now LibreOffice.
Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Informative)
What exactly makes Word so bad? It seems functional enough, and I fully admit that maybe I'm just not understanding the finer points of some programming strategies, so what's the deal?
Let's see, just a few off the top of my head:
- Terrible flow control. It you change page one, have fun tweaking all the rest of the pages to get things to line up.
- Lack of frame control. In order to create a large document or book with complicated multipage graphs or graphics, you need a strong set of rules for where to break up rows, etc. Not to mention the flow of any text around the frame.
- Non-organic styles. There is no easy way to change the style of logical parts of the document globally, for example, change the size of the font on the headers of a certain class of tables over all chapters. Or to put it another way, global definitions plus exceptions.
Word users are just used to the constant re-treaking of pages to make them look right. Just another example of Microsoft office leading to massive wastage of man hours.
Secret APIs (Score:4, Informative)
Microsoft used secret APIs [pcpro.co.uk] to give its programs an advantage over competitors. That had a big effect in the 1990's. It is apparently still going on in some things but we'll have to wait, as usual, a long time before it turns up in court records. And like before, the damage will have been done. The only way to stop it is to stop using M$ products.
You can find more like that if you wade through the material of the Comes V Microsoft case [groklaw.net] at the now archived Groklaw site. Basically anything bad that has been said about M$ and the people that work there is true.