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The new word processor wars: A fresh crop of productivity apps

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Re: The new word processor wars: A fresh crop of productivity apps

#61

Post by TeMPOraL »

otikik wrote: post #55
TeMPOraL wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I like Word, because it has a particular niche - fast WYSIWYG use and mid-sized documents. That is, I can quickly make the exact nice-looking document I need, and print it. Without clunky UX (of Open/LibreOffice), and without it choking on mid-sized documents that's characteristic of GSuite and friends.

I would not call it WYSIWYG. Send it to a friend with a slightly different version of Office or Windows, or without the same fonts installed, or with a different locale, or a different printer, and it stops being WYSIWYG.

I'll grant you the version difference, but otherwise I strongly disagree. Font issue doesn't exist if you use standard fonts and is solvable in general by ticking the "embed fonts" checkbox. You're better off than with SaaS versions, which offer you a very small selection of fonts. With printers, it's actually MS Office that can paper over the differences between models and drivers; you're better off by default.

With the set of available feature, Word is as close to WYSIWYG as you can possibly get.

Re: The new word processor wars: A fresh crop of productivity apps

#62

Post by chrisseaton »

xte wrote: post #59
amphibian87 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don't you like Word? I think it's still going to be the best for a while, if not only because it's massive. My CS professor says it's the biggest program ever written. It can so so much, like check for passive voice and more subtle grammar things. At the end of the day, the subscription model is off-putting, but "needs to die?" why?

Well... Because is a complex, utter, inflexible software. For instance: I need to write a letter, on my desktop I start skeletor (Emacs built-in template solution) with a single keypress, choose the wright template, start writing in pure text, hit C-c C-e and choose the appropriate export format, for instance pdf via LaTeX. In a fraction of time I made a document far superior of any word-processor can ever made, with…

> hit C-c C-e

I have no idea what this even means so it’s already too complicated for me to follow!

Re: The new word processor wars: A fresh crop of productivity apps

#63

Post by opan »

gnicholas wrote: post #37
npunt wrote: post #12

Just a quibble but I see this a lot - if you're talking about strategy it's "bottom-up", not "bottoms-up". A bottom-up strategy is something like marketing your tool to users who then bring it into their company for wider adoption. A bottoms-up strategy is drinking until the problem goes away.

I have the same feeling about this, and I've noticed that folks from the UK are more likely to use "bottoms-up" to mean both. I rarely hear it from US-born speakers. Has anyone else noticed this pattern?

Not a Brit myself, but I've noticed they tend to put an s on the end of a lot of things. e.g. "maths"

Re: The new word processor wars: A fresh crop of productivity apps

#64

Post by mark_l_watson »

While I like to see competition, I still think Microsoft has the market for the foreseeable future because you get so much value. My yearly subscription for Office 365 family plan is just renewing and I can;t imagine not paying $99/year for: everyone in the family gets 1 TB of cloud storage, web based apps (which work just fine on Linux), and always up to date versions of the Office apps, if you want those too, and quality mobile apps for access to documents anytime.

I use markdown and Latex to write my books, but I still find a lot of value in Office for occasional uses.

Re: The new word processor wars: A fresh crop of productivity apps

#65

Post by piker »

jen729w wrote: post #22
SllX wrote: post #3

At this point I look at Word and Excel the same way I look at bash, gcc, grep, sed, awk, et cetera: there is so much iniertia that even when different and arguably better tools come along, it still never truly goes away. A lot of people still use emacs, vim, BBEdit and so on, but a lot of people also use IntelliJ, VSCode and Atom or whatever is in vogue this year. Vim and emacs will never truly go away no matter how…

Word, yes. Word is a turd. Word needs to die. Excel, however, is magic. Forget the nasty ribbon interface and the horrid MS window chrome, I'm just talking about what happens inside those cells. Say what you will about Microsoft as a company, about the fact that Excel is possibly over-used and that users should probably get a database. I don't care. Excel, at its core, is a magical product. Nothing else gets close to…

> Word, yes. Word is a turd. Word needs to die.

It's not clear you'd find a lot of lawyers (i.e., a class of power small-document-scale Word users) that would agree with this sentiment.

Re: The new word processor wars: A fresh crop of productivity apps

#66

Post by xte »

chrisseaton wrote: post #62
xte wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well... Because is a complex, utter, inflexible software. For instance: I need to write a letter, on my desktop I start skeletor (Emacs built-in template solution) with a single keypress, choose the wright template, start writing in pure text, hit C-c C-e and choose the appropriate export format, for instance pdf via LaTeX. In a fraction of time I made a document far superior of any word-processor can ever made, with…

> hit C-c C-e I have no idea what this even means so it’s already too complicated for me to follow!

Well. Basically if I have to write a letter I:

- hit a single key on my keyboard (pause to be precise)

- hit 'l' followed by few arrow down to choose between italian, french, swedish or english letter template than enter

- start type the letter (my sender address autocompleted, I only type firs letter than tab and yasnippet insert the rest correctly)

- hit a two key combination (control+c than control+e) or run org-export and quickly answer (with predefined defaults) where to save my file than create and open a nice pdf ready to print, optional scanned signature included.

Of course that work anywhere on my desktop, I do not have to open any specific application, choose templates, choose from them, fight to format the text properly, find in complex menu how to insert an image (my signature), go looking for it on disk etc. Of course my letter get properly saved/archived digitally, I can send via mail in other two keystrokes etc.

It's normal that sound complicated for you if you never tried it. I see many colleges that remain astonished seeing my demos inside Emacs and can't hardly figure out what happen on my desktop. It's a path to learn something new and effective, but learn an OS, a different system not a simple single-purpose application.

Re: The new word processor wars: A fresh crop of productivity apps

#67

Post by xte »

rusk wrote: post #60
xte wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why the hell a spreadsheet? Why not use any scripting language you want with org-table/org-babel or with some ORM/driver to access datas?

Because it's convenient, and I can share. Not to mention the fact that Excel isn't "just a spreadsheet" . I could go on, but most of the other sibling comments here have expounded enough upon her virtues. EDIT LOL ORM/driver - because life's too short that's why

Mh, for me just because life is too short I never really learned spreadsheet software (and I have seen many disaster made thanks to them, including important institutional and scientific ones) and I'm happy without them...

Try to look for some Emacs demos on YT&c, perhaps you'll discover a different world :-)

Re: The new word processor wars: A fresh crop of productivity apps

#68

Post by chrisseaton »

xte wrote: post #66
chrisseaton wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> hit C-c C-e I have no idea what this even means so it’s already too complicated for me to follow!

Well. Basically if I have to write a letter I: - hit a single key on my keyboard (pause to be precise) - hit 'l' followed by few arrow down to choose between italian, french, swedish or english letter template than enter - start type the letter (my sender address autocompleted, I only type firs letter than tab and yasnippet insert the rest correctly) - hit a two key combination (control+c than control+e) or run org-e…

Well I'm sure you must have good reasons for setting something up like this and it must work for you, but to me it all sounds like mysterious incantations (why are you pressing the pause key to do something other than pause something?) and over-optimisation, rather than making things plain and simple.

How many letters do you write a day for it to need to be optimised into single key shortcuts?

My bottleneck is never formatting a letter - it's deciding what to write.

Also: what I actually meant was I didn't recognise C-X as meaning press the control key and then the X key. I've always seen that written as Ctrl + X. Why does Emacs need to do it differently to everyone else?

Re: The new word processor wars: A fresh crop of productivity apps

#69

Post by glaberficken »

xte wrote: post #67
rusk wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's convenient, and I can share. Not to mention the fact that Excel isn't "just a spreadsheet" . I could go on, but most of the other sibling comments here have expounded enough upon her virtues. EDIT LOL ORM/driver - because life's too short that's why

Mh, for me just because life is too short I never really learned spreadsheet software (and I have seen many disaster made thanks to them, including important institutional and scientific ones) and I'm happy without them... Try to look for some Emacs demos on YT&c, perhaps you'll discover a different world :-)

Is that really a solid argument? Haven't you also seen numerous "disasters made" with other platforms / tools / programming languages "including in important institutional and scientific ones"? (no snark intended)

Re: The new word processor wars: A fresh crop of productivity apps

#70

Post by watersb »

daniel_iversen wrote: post #42

I’m disappointed to not see our Dropbox Paper in that writeup, although it’s a good article! Wish they wouldn’t call it “word processor wars” though since that of course misses the point - it has too many associations to the printed page whereas I think everyone incl the author and the people quoted knows it’s about a more collaborative content creation experience.

Yes. Dropbox Paper is fantastic.
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