XKCD: It's more than a comic

I suspect most people will be fine with WYSIWYG, though.

Bold spaces dont bother me, since they are easy to find and correct. But there is this crazy thing that sometimes happens where I put some formatting at the end of a paragraph, and the text editor insists that the next paragraph must utlize the same formating. When you change the format in the second paragraph, the formatted part of the first paragraph changes too. This seems to be associated with page breaks somehow.

Edited by DeMarquis on Feb 9th 2019 at 9:24:09 AM

I'm told LaTeX is very commonly used in academia.

That's the main problem with WYSIWYG editors. You see the end result, but not the content of the text, so you don't know what part a particular piece of formatting is applied to. You don't even know what that piece of formatting is until you look really closely. The advocates of markup languages say that the writer should be concerned about the content, but not the format. That's the job of the editor. In most cases, there is no reason for the writer to care about where the page breaks are. It's the same reason CSS was invented: to separate the content from the formatting.

LaTeX is a very powerful and versatile markup language. It also has a steep learning curve, and its code is not as readable as the more lightweight languages, so while it's really good for writing scientific papers, it's not really suitable for most writers, be it technical writers or novelists.

Edited by petersohn on Feb 10th 2019 at 9:00:18 PM

I've studied at university for six years, and everyone wrote their papers in Word. I have never once heard a suggestion that I should write a paper in La Te X. Maybe Dutch universities are different in that way, or it depends on the field (mine was humanities), but that's my experience.

It probably depends on the field. LaTeX is more common in fields of hard sciences, especially math and computer science.

This reminds me of the nightmare that the Microsoft Office styles and formatting can turn into sometimes (they like for instance to consider that there is a formatting associated to a line break, so anything you write after this line is "polluted" by it). And woe to you is you decide to paste some text from a document with a different formatting style.

I work in Academia (computer sciences), and a lot of people there use LaTeX (which has problems on its own, but not these ones)... except my boss, who insists to have everything in PowerPoint or Word. And of course there is always some idiot in the lab who uses Libre Office and insists it is 100% compatible with Office (spoiler alert: it's not, which should come as no surprise to anybody who has tried editing documents written with different versions of Office...)

Edited by C105 on Feb 10th 2019 at 2:35:49 PM

Office does have a paste option that matches the formatting of pasted text to the document it’s inserted into.

That one is rather recent and, as I have found out the hard way, does not always work as expected (especially with bullet styles).

I've used Libre Office, Google Docs, and Zoho, and I can confirm that there is no perfect solution to the formatting problem. I dont know anything at all about markup languages.

Is there a perfect solution to the Word problem, by the way? Specifically, it's 99 bucks price tag?

Google's office products definitely also have "paste and match style".

@Redmess: Both Libre Office (which is downloaded to your harddrive) and Zoho Docs (which is cloudbased) are free. Both are comparable to Word in terms of features and options.

While LibreOffice has most features that MS Office products have, it isn't quite there in terms of usability. Also, there are compatibility issues. LibreOffice can open Office documents, but there might be glitches. However, if you save something in LibreOffice in Office format, then there is a high chance Office won't be able to open it properly.

What about WPS office? From what I understand, it is a popular alternative among academics.

Ive never had a problem going from LO to Word. Occassional formating corrections, that's all. But... free.

There is also Google Docs, although they're potentially a bit more limited in their ability to emulate Office, being a bigger target.

The real advantage of Google Docs is that it supports real-time collaboration. Otherwise, I prefer solutions that can be edited offline.

Google's productivity suite is wonderfully convenient, but it does suffer from a lack of features that I've come to expect from Office. However bloated and unwieldy the latter may be, you cannot deny its richness.

MS Office had quite a lot of features even back in the '90s. Most people still use only a fraction of them.

I remember one of my teachers saying that the more frequently used options are put on the left.

You can develop entire, self-contained productivity applications using the VBA language combined with the feature set of Office products. Most people don't even use a tiny fraction of their potential, and no other software suite even comes close to what Office offers.

Didn't I hear that Excel spreadsheets are accidentally Turing-complete?

"...no other software suite even comes close to what Office offers."

Libre Office does.

Damn you, Microsoft, and your ubiquitous, convenient, yet expensive word processing software.