Using Microsoft Word with Git • Hacker News Board

Re: Using Microsoft Word with Git

#71

Post by andi999 » Fri, Aug 28, 2020, 2:31 PM UTC

PaulHoule wrote: post #59

viraptor wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you're collaborating on a document then markdown or LaTeX has you covered. These are not WYSIWYG solutions which answers 99% of your question "why". When people want to write a document they want to write things and have the things appear on a page, possibly in different formatting. Injecting ideas like source files, rendering pipeline, etc. will just result in confused people. That's why online solutions like G…

TeX is a 1970s system. I thought it was cool in the 1990s, but in 2020 it makes the typesetter in me want to hurl.

Whats wrong with the tex typesetting?

Re: Using Microsoft Word with Git

#72

Post by dvfjsdhgfv » Fri, Aug 28, 2020, 2:43 PM UTC

ben-morris wrote: post #12

dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Congrtulations, it seems really easy to use. Just one thing: I noticed formatting changes (such as italics) are ignored. Is this deliberate?

Thanks! It is, it's quite hard to highlight exactly what changed regarding formatting and we found our users mostly cared about content changes. Having said that, adding an option to include formatting changes is on our roadmap.

Yes, it very much depends on the type of content you're editing. My take is that if you don't care about tracking formatting changes, you don't really need Microsoft Word - many other tools could do better.

However, when you're a professional copy editor of non-fiction publications, a substantial part of your work will consist of checking little details, such as making sure the titles of books, magazines, and articles are formatted correctly and so on.

Re: Using Microsoft Word with Git

#73

Post by noyesno » Fri, Aug 28, 2020, 2:47 PM UTC

I work with telco standards and the organizations that I follow use Word documents. The way we keep a paper trail of all the changes to a new standard’s draft is by separating the change proposals into their own documents (using change marks against the latest agreed draft) and only allowing a named editor to actually implement the agreed change proposals back to the master document. The change proposal documents, together with the meeting minutes create a perfect history of who proposed what changes and when.

Re: Using Microsoft Word with Git

#74

Post by WoodenChair » Fri, Aug 28, 2020, 2:49 PM UTC

MarcScott wrote: post #33

viraptor wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you're collaborating on a document then markdown or LaTeX has you covered. These are not WYSIWYG solutions which answers 99% of your question "why". When people want to write a document they want to write things and have the things appear on a page, possibly in different formatting. Injecting ideas like source files, rendering pipeline, etc. will just result in confused people. That's why online solutions like G…

I think my argument is that WYSIWYG needs to die. For the vast majority of people they want nothing more than: > text > image > more text > table > more text There are any number of applications that allow you to write markdown and view the generated HTML in whatever formatting you want. Your recipient then gets to choose their own fonts, colours etc, which from an accessibility point of view, is much better. Unless…

> I think my argument is that WYSIWYG needs to die.

WYSIWYG is a big part of what made the GUI revolution so successful. The computer for the rest of us, wouldn't be for the rest of us, if we had to worry about Git and how to render our file format.

I've had the same frustrations dealing with publishers and Word templates as you had. Your mistake is that you are conflating our experience writing a technical book with the vast majority of users who are not writing technical literature. A writing system for the masses should be as easy to use (for the basics at least) as paper and pencil. Git and learning even a simple markup language does not meet this standard.

Re: Using Microsoft Word with Git

#75

Post by PaulHoule » Fri, Aug 28, 2020, 3:02 PM UTC

andi999 wrote: post #71

PaulHoule wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TeX is a 1970s system. I thought it was cool in the 1990s, but in 2020 it makes the typesetter in me want to hurl.

Whats wrong with the tex typesetting?

I can't stand the fonts, don't like how it applies space, etc.

TeX is like a programmable pocket calculator from the 1970s, way ahead of it's time but today it's something that conspires with Word, Google Docs, and other dull tools to suck out the oxygen for sharp tools.

Re: Using Microsoft Word with Git

#76

Post by ISL » Fri, Aug 28, 2020, 3:05 PM UTC

gumby wrote: post #55

atoav wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who is at the intersection of tech and arts one of the things I like about using git in projects is that it is very clear what is the latest official defintive final variant of a piece of data and you don't have to ask anybody to get it. When I worked as a VFX freelancer I was amazed at the number of hours (=money) burned by marketing agencies who didn't manage to give me the definitive variant for a simpl…

> As someone who is at the intersection of tech and arts one of the things I like about using git in projects is that it is very clear what is the latest official defintive final variant of a piece of data and you don't have to ask anybody to get it. As git is a distributed system I think it’s not at all clear what the definitive final variant might be —- and that is a strength. That can be handled externally to git…

Git Tags can substantially address this concern.

Re: Using Microsoft Word with Git

#77

Post by wenc » Fri, Aug 28, 2020, 3:12 PM UTC

binbag wrote: post #22

I don’t understand why this 6 year old article has been posted when current Microsoft 365 versions of Word et al have built in version control and real time collaboration.

I suspect most people in this crowd either don't have direct experience with Office 365, or haven't discovered its versioning/real-time collab features.

That said, "track changes" is still used extensively especially with parties outside the organization, especially for legal documents.

Re: Using Microsoft Word with Git

#78

Post by quietbritishjim » Fri, Aug 28, 2020, 3:13 PM UTC

PaulHoule wrote: post #60

xnyan wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're speaking absolute crazy talk man. >Write markdown You have now lost almost all people who currently write documents. Nobody who is not a developer wants to write in markdown. The mass market wants point and click, buttons, and WYSIWYG.

What gets me is that there's something basically wrong with the "Microsoft Word" text editing model. Basically, when you try to set the properties of text (e.g. bold, fonts, ...) there are always anomalous behaviors involving: * if you just start typing what font it is in * selections (why is that the selection region seems to actively avoid the exact selection you want?) There is something fundamentally wrong with t…

I think you can turn off that smart selection thing. There is corresponding "smart" behaviour when you drag a selection to a different place so you don't end up with missing or duplicated spaces, so the precise boundary of the selection isn't as important as you think unless you want to select mid-word. I think for most people this behaviour that you find annoying is actually useful - remember that Microsoft is one of the few companies that actually does real user testing.

For your other objection (and maybe what you were also really getting at with your selection objection), maybe you'd like WordPerfect 5.1's "reveal codes"? :-) We can all agree that Microsoft wouldn't have hesitated to steal that feature if it would have benefitted them. The fact that they didn't is proof that formatting markup is something that was historically tried (or considered) and rejected, rather than something waiting to happen in the future.

In any case, for a program as huge as Microsoft Word, I think this is all quite minor. How much of your day is really ruined if you start typing after some bold text, find that the new text is bold when you didn't want it to be, and have to manually turn it off again? It's a fundamental problem with the model, like you said, but has surprisingly tiny impact on usability. If this is your biggest objection, it's almost proof that the program is pretty good. (But I can sympathise with minor objections: I hate copy and paste works differently in Excel then any other program!)

Re: Using Microsoft Word with Git

#79

Post by quadrifoliate » Fri, Aug 28, 2020, 3:25 PM UTC

MarcScott wrote: post #28

I really don't understand how Word remains so popular. It was created at a time when few people had internet access, and was designed to produce printed documents. It was the perfect tool to write newsletters, flyers, articles, academic papers and manuscripts. The world has moved on though, and I fail to see Word's relevance today, other than the sheer number of people that are familiar with it. Word is expensive, pr…

My theory is that the answer lies along a different axis than the other commenters. I think Word is a consequence of the the fact that modern office work is optimized to extract the maximum short-term resources out of people, or at least put up the appearance of doing so.

Consider someone dealing with inter-departmental collaboration on documents at a company in the 70s or 80s. They could potentially invent their own system, make paper copies mandatory, go full computer, or any number of solutions in between. Technology was considered hard and looked recognizably so, and management was less likely to question technical views and opinions about this. People were way less likely to get fired and generally visualized staying there for a while, so they were comfortable sticking to their viewpoints.

Today, your boss and their boss are all concerned with how to get the maximum amount of work out of you in the time you're at the company. So if you propose retraining everyone on Open Office or Markdown, because it has high potential for a better way of tracking changes or something, you'll get pushback from a) management, because the CEO is going to say “but I use Word all the time, why can't you just use that?” and b) the workers, because they know they will be forced to learn it on their own time rather than being given a proper amount of time to train and learn. [1]

I think modern society and modern work are slowly defaulting to the idea of quickly throwing in the towel and just using whatever technology is approved by the milieu. This is true even in our industry, consider this article [2] by Latacora [3] for instance: it's full of statements which approximately say “Just use CloudTrail”, “Just Use Jamf”, “Just Use Okta SSO” etc. If our industry is doing things like this to optimize extraction (even the article acknowledges that SOC2 is purely documentation optimized for selling to big companies), why would we be so surprised that publishing departments and such are optimized to Just Use Microsoft Word rather than a technically better system?

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[1] Think back: when was the last time you had a proper training about how to use a certain piece of software by people from the company building it, or at least certified trainers? These were way more common back in the day.

[2] https://latacora.micro.blog/2020/03/12/the-soc-starting.html

[3] A very respectable security company focused on startups.

Re: Using Microsoft Word with Git

#80

Post by brudgers » Fri, Aug 28, 2020, 3:26 PM UTC

atoav wrote: post #35

codingdave wrote: post #14

My SaaS deals primarily with legal documents that for years had been maintained with Word. The pain of emailing documents is real, but the comfort level with how Word works is also real. Over the years, most organizations have developed internal workflows to share and send documents around that bypass the pains, and while they may not be perfect, they work. The funny thing is that the document authors like these ways…

As someone who is at the intersection of tech and arts one of the things I like about using git in projects is that it is very clear what is the latest official defintive final variant of a piece of data and you don't have to ask anybody to get it. When I worked as a VFX freelancer I was amazed at the number of hours (=money) burned by marketing agencies who didn't manage to give me the definitive variant for a simpl…

you should choose the defaults of your communication culture in such a way, that it works under the absolute worst conditions

The defaults are sensible. Throw money at it and pay someone enough to sort things out and get it done, e.g. you as a freelancer get a data dump and ask the right question and the problem is solved. Sure it costs money. But everything costs money.

Git works great among peers. But most organizations are hierarchical. And the boss doesn't have to give a shit about which draft is the latest because the boss is the boss.