Word Processors: Stupid and Inefficient

http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/wp.html

by mrzool • 9 years ago

3 3 9 years ago

ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu

flukus• 9 years ago

I had to give technical support (get word to work) for a friend recently who was working on a final group project which was a complex 100 page document and it was an absolute nightmare. Emails everywhere as version control, things being copied and pasted and losing formatting, incompatibilities between different versions of word and stuff just disappearing in the chaos. I can't fathom how anyone in there right mind can defend this as being more user friendly than a tex document and really basic version control.

I had a presentation to do for work recently and I went with latex+beamer despite having no prior experience with either and it turned out to be a fantastic decision. A make file and a bash script with inotifywait and I even had a live preview going.

It reminds me of that Einstein quote "Everything should be as simple as possible but no simpler", it feels like many of our tools try to make things too simple at the cost of making many things harder than they need to be.

xor_null• 9 years ago

You want to explain to someone who e-mail word documents how to setup/configure and use a latex distribution? I think for most tasks Word etc. are sufficent.

quanticle• 9 years ago

I think this article is drawing a false dichotomy. It's saying that there's a hard dichotomy between a word-processor based workflow and a workflow based upon a text editor and a typesetting engine. In reality, no such dichotomy exists. Word processors since Wordstar have had tools to define styles and update those styles at once across the document.

Word Processors: Stupid and Inefficient

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