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Why Microsoft Word must die

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Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#371

Post by jeltz »

pmelendez wrote: post #199
DanBC wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Type a few word, hit "Save", and automatically get reasonable default fonts and margins? Check. Type a few more words, make some typos, have them fixed automatically? Check. Certain words need to be italicized or underlined? Check. Certain words need to be in a different font? Check. Who cares if it's consistent, the boss wants it bold so just make it bold. Indent the first line by X inches, double-space here, sing…

>"That's Abiword. A much smaller and cheaper piece of software. That is all that most office workers need. So why is Office, a huge piece of software the default?" Abiword's grammar checker is not nearly as good as Word's. That is specially in non-english laguanges. Also I would add to that list all the templates and design that Word brings out-of-box. I am a weird case because I use Abiword at work and Office at hom…

Last I used Word it did not have any grammar checker for Swedish and its spell checking was terrible (though better than LibreOffice). It has hopefully improved the last about 5 years though.

I have actually only used one working spell checker for Swedish: stava. And the ideas behind it are trivial, so I guess that nobody else has written a specialized spell checker for Swedish. Generalized ones like ispell, aspell, hunspell and Word's do not work for Swedish.

http://www.nada.kth.se/~viggo/stava/

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#372

Post by ShirtlessRod »

PeterisP wrote: post #340
ShirtlessRod wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then shouldn't he be far more mad at his industry, not the tool?

Isn't that what he's doing? "X needs to die" quite clearly means "you people in industry need to stop using X", not "burn X at the stake".

I honestly can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not. I'll just assume you are and move on.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#373

Post by phaer »

regularfry wrote: post #341
phaer wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? The result would be exactly the same, right? You don't have your unpushed commit if your laptop is broken, neither with svn nor with git. The only difference is that you still can use your local git repository if your server burns down, but you can't do that with svn.

With SVN a commit is a push. You can't forget to push after you've committed.

Right. The last time i used subversion was about 7 years ago, so i forgot it. But it makes sense for centralized vc

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#374

Post by daemin »

pge wrote: post #346
tripzilch wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried doing that in Word once, it's nowhere near the solid foundation that actual style sheets provide (thinking of CSS/HTML here). I only needed to style H1, H2, P, EM and possibly A (they don't have those names in Word, but you get the point). That's probably the simplest document structures you can have for a task that reasonably makes use of styles. The biggest problem was, those styles are like liquid, slippin…

This post begs the question - can Word be replaced with HTML/CSS? What if there were a WYSIWYG HTML/CSS editor? HTML would provide the intechangable document format; the ubiquity of browsers means everyone already has a document viewer; it would allow those with a desire for greater control to edit text directly in a text editor, separate from the presentation layer; and documents could be formatted for different pre…

I don't think replacing Word documents with HTML/CSS is viable, since they specify content for two different formats. HTML is suited to flowing content like a river, whereas Word is for documents meant to fit on a printed page, like on a stone tablet.

You'd have to create quite complicated style templates to get HTML formatted to fit onto pages.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#375

Post by xshoppyx »

scott_s wrote: post #293
iSnow wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No offense, but using git for collaborative writing? That's like using nukes to get rid of mosquitoes. SVN would be a poor but better choice, but you'd rather use stypi, google docs or something like that.

I have always used source control for papers I write in groups - it's just assumed we're going to use source control. The only discussion is which one. I've used cvs, svn, git and mercurial when writing papers. Our papers are written in Latex. We often commit raw data and benchmark source code to the repository too.

Latex essentially has the same properties as source code in a VCS's eyes. .docx files would not work as well.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#376

Post by scholia »

jgamman wrote: post #325
dr_preston wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I purchased the "Home and Student Edition" for my wife to use on her new MacBook Air. A few months ago she started writing short fiction, which we have since self-published on Kindle. We had to switch to Libre Office, though, because when I contacted Microsoft support and asked them about the "Non-Commercial use" restriction, they told me writing a novel counts as commercial activity.

I'm sorry but what did you just say? you can't write something on MS Word home edition and sell it for cash? seriously, i had no idea you could restrict something so basic as a word processor - FFS that's absurd!

It's not absurd: it's a perfectly reasonable and entirely rational deal.

Microsoft Office is commercial software costs roughly $300. If you want to use it for commercial purposes, you pay the price. However, there's a special deal where you get a Home & Student version for a third of the price, on condition that you don't use it for commercial purposes (ie as a replacement for the version you should be buying).

A lot of commercial programs are available in cheap student versions or in free versions for home (non-commercial) use. This is standard industry practice. It's not a Microsoft thing.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#377

Post by scholia »

unsignedint wrote: post #160
dr_preston wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I purchased the "Home and Student Edition" for my wife to use on her new MacBook Air. A few months ago she started writing short fiction, which we have since self-published on Kindle. We had to switch to Libre Office, though, because when I contacted Microsoft support and asked them about the "Non-Commercial use" restriction, they told me writing a novel counts as commercial activity.

Which it really confuses me as "Home" part. I can't think of so much case that full fledged WP useful in home context other than writing a letter maybe...

It's Home & Student, and a lot of students use it at home, as distinct from in the classroom. Also, it's not just WP. Plenty of people do stuff that benefits from using Office. They have hobbies or are members of local groups that produce fliers or newsletters (church, youth, etc).

By the way, Windows includes a free word processor, WordPad, that does what most home users need without them having to buy Office. There are also free viewers for Office docs...

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#378

Post by reycharles »

xshoppyx wrote: post #375
scott_s wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have always used source control for papers I write in groups - it's just assumed we're going to use source control. The only discussion is which one. I've used cvs, svn, git and mercurial when writing papers. Our papers are written in Latex. We often commit raw data and benchmark source code to the repository too.

Latex essentially has the same properties as source code in a VCS's eyes. .docx files would not work as well.

I wonder how true that is if the xml wasn't compressed.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#379

Post by lallysingh »

PeterisP wrote: post #339
lallysingh wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're absurdly underestimating people. A diff is a bunch of lines removed, and lines added. That's a pretty damn natural representation. As for git's complexity, it's all in its completely opaque display of its internal state. A chain of deltas - diffs - isn't complicated. It's all git's (perverse) desire to follow the exact-same command-line interface as cat and awk, when neither contain persistent state.

'a bunch of lines removed/added' is a great representation for stuff that consist of semi-atomic lines, like code. It is a horrible representation for stuff where edits may consist of both typo fixes, and separate wording changes in a single sentence - where you might want to accept change to one word and reject change to another word, despite that they came from a single "commit" to a single line. For collaborative…

You have the same problem with software.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#380

Post by unsignedint »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #158
GuiA wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your average college professor isn't going to learn how to use a version control system to suggest changes to his student's thesis-in-progress. Word has version control though, and it's appreciated by many in academia. Version control for humans is a Big Startup Idea, I wouldn't be surprised if Dropbox and Github were trying to tackle it (from 2 different angles: Dropbox from the "how do we get average the user to…

Yes, but it only works when you use word. Yours sincerely, a graduate student whose thesis is written in LaTeX and then converted to RTF and then hand edited so his supervisor(s) can give him comments. I sent them a link to my github repository, but they never took me up on my offer :(

+1 for PDF as well.

I actually do make bit of things in LaTeX through Org-mode at the office, and sending things in PDF actually makes it clear what kind of handling I'm looking for. If I'm actually expecting someone to revise my writing, then I'll just send them plaintext.

Now considering even Adobe Reader allows commenting, I don't think there are many of issues any more...

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