Word Processors: Stupid and Inefficient

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

by b-man • 17 years ago

47 47 17 years ago

ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu

swannodette3• 17 years ago

Speaking of which I've become a huge fan of Ulysses for OS X, http://www.the-soulmen.com/ulysses/. Costs $$$, but it does exactly what is described in this article - you focus only on writing and document management. Only when you're exporting (to LaTeX for example) do you worry about presentation.

wallflower• 17 years ago

  <META NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="TtH 1.93">

I was happy to see that he practices what he advocates.

amichail2• 17 years ago

Check out TeXmacs, which gives you the best of WYSIWYG word processors and TeX/LaTeX.

There is no good reason to compromise nowadays.

xtho2• 17 years ago

That would be for typesetting letters and invitation cards in latex? That's what WYSIWYG word processors/editors are good at.

amichail2• 17 years ago

It's great for math/science writing.

The only problem is that LaTeX is typically required for math/science publications.

scottw• 17 years ago

If this were a few more years recent, I'd hope the author would revise section 2.5 to be "The virtues of UTF-8", as nearly all modern text editors handle UTF-8 well.

delayclose5• 17 years ago

Even for ten years ago, forgetting that other countries need to typeset too was kind of lame. ASCII is seriously limited outside American context.

j_baker• 17 years ago

You know, I agree with the author. But end users will revolt at the sheer mention of taking WYSIWYG away from them. I think it's unreasonable myself, but then again I'm a computer geek.

swannodette3• 17 years ago

I also think what the author describes would ring true for writers (a different kind of geek), thus the market viability of writing focused writing tools.

delayclose5• 17 years ago

Using WYSIWYG with predefined styles is more writing focused than messing around with TeX, I would think. I think the author seriously misrepresents the way Word is poised to be used today (could be that he's accurate about what Word was like back then, though).

derefr• 17 years ago

There's a half-way point between Word/WYSIWYG and LaTeX/markup: desktop publishing tools. Write your text in Notepad (or perhaps Wordpad if you want some italics) and then create a textbox in the layout document and paste/link it in, kerning and leading and weighting and fonting and flowing it to your heart's content, all WYSIWYG.

misuba• 17 years ago

It isn't clear who the author is speaking to here. I hope for his sake that he isn't really speaking to most users of word processors.

For most people, structure in writing is visual. It's a paragraph because it has an indent or a blank line before it; it may also represent one complete idea or all that good stuff they say in English class, but that isn't what makes it a paragraph. It was that way before they started using word processors, and it'll continue to be that way - any other means of describing structure is always going to feel like a distraction to most humans with a need to put one word after another.

That said, most people don't care about typographical quality. It satisfies their emotional needs for a memo or letter to look typeset at all.

For these people, telling them to take what's now a one-step process and turning it into two steps, to gain some supposed advantages that either don't demonstrably matter or that you won't ever persuade them to care about, is not gonna fly.

That said, for those writers who do care about structure and typography, Ulysses looks pretty cool.

rayval• 17 years ago

The author confuses formatting for presentation ("typesetting") and formatting for authoring.

By ignoring the rich rendering capabilities of WYSIWYG word processors in favor of simple monospaced text, a potentially valuable dimension is lost.

tylero• 17 years ago

I've seen at least as many technical authors get distracted by the intricacies of LaTeX or DocBook as those trying to "design" in Word or OpenOffice. Using markup doesn't prevent the problem of diverting authorial attention to design. Every composition tool can be abused.

Word and OpenOffice can be used intelligently, if you avoid the design-as-you-write trap. I've never really seen a diffing tool (for prose, mind you) with the readability of a word processor's 'redline' or trackchanges feature. Anyone have recommendations on that front?

gacek• 17 years ago

The author admits that "there are some sorts of documents for which a WYSIWYG word processor is indeed the natural tool. I'm thinking of short, ad hoc, documents which have a high ratio of formatting ``business'' to textual content: flyers, posters, party invitations and the like".

I think that those ad-hoc, one-page documents represent a majority of documents created by users - even if you count the pages, not the complete documents.

macmac2• 17 years ago

You ignore the qualifier at the end "high ratio of formatting ``business'' to textual content". With that in mind i certainly do not think your assertion is right. The average business memo has - or should have - very little formatting.

shizcakes• 17 years ago

"business" in this context seems to mean 'activity' rather than 'for the purposes of commerce'.

lazyant2• 17 years ago

What I want to know is that why after 25 years or so in MS Word when I open a document (usually somebody else's) and close it the app always asks if I want to save the changes even if I just read it and didn't touch anything.

How come MS Word is not able to detect that there were no changes?

shalmanese• 17 years ago

Because there's probably something similar to a "Today's Date" field in the document somewhere which will change simply from the act of opening and closing a document.

lazyant2• 17 years ago

Sure there must be a technical explanation, yours is very plausible but it doesn't change the fact that this annoyance only happens in MS Word (that I know of); it doesn't happen in MS Excel or OpenOffice Writer for example. If there's a 'today's date' then they can just add an 'last updated date' or similar and keep track of the file changes.

It's more aggravating if we take into account how popular, old and big the application is.

lmkg• 17 years ago

The world is not dichotomous as the author seems to make it (as is usually the case). Word 2007 blurs the distinctions he's making, because it started putting in formats like "Title" and "Body" instead of just "14pt" and "Arial" (or verdanna or whatever). If the author is using these semantic meta-styles appropriately, they can get most of the advantages of a LaTeX style of coding, in a WYSIWYG interface.

I'm more for than against the author's main point fo separation of concerns, even in the realm of text processing, and I think especially for corporate communications that have to be all branded and specified, a LaTeX style document is probably the way to go. However, the overhead of having to code your document, instead of write it, is a big interface barrier, both in terms of adoption, and in terms of productivity. Also, in the cases where you do care about presentation during the construction of your document (which do arise), having a sharp divide between the two processes makes for a lot of annoying context-switching. I'm sure I'm not the only one with a horror story of having to compile a TeX document dozens of times to make a damn picture align correctly. Word isn't perfect in this respect either, but my worst-case horror story is not nearly as bad (5 minutes of drag-and-dropping).

nollidge• 17 years ago

The author covers this:

You can, if you are careful, achieve effects such as changing the appearance of all section headings with one command. But few users of Word exploit this consistently, and that is not surprising: the WYSIWYG approach does not encourage concern with structure.

delayclose5• 17 years ago

Yes, but he's talking about people who have no idea how to use Word properly. How would similarly "skilled" people fare with TeX? I mean, what, you don't need to be "careful" writing all that "/this is a level 2 heading" stuff into your ASCII document?

pradocchia• 17 years ago

In years long past, I did some programmatic document creation with Word 97 & VBA. Even then, you could specify formats like "Title" and "Body". They were called Styles, and they worked fairly well.

JulianMorrison2• 17 years ago

TeX is a maze of twisty Turing-complete code in a weird programming language nothing like anything else you've ever seen. LaTeX is a bunch of templates you can barely tune and certainly can't create unless you're a TeX wizard. ConTeXt is better but creating templates is still a pain. They all disrupt the flow of your document with meaningless \jibber{jabber}.

If I were planning to first-draft a long document and didn't want to be interrupted with nonsense, I would write it in markdown and render it to whatever output format using pandoc.

gcv• 17 years ago

Meaningless \jibber{jabber}

Nonsense. When you program, does your code look like meaningless.jibber(jabber)? I certainly hope not, and your TeX shouldn't look meaningless, either. TeX is a programming language, and you need to learn to use it effectively. If you are doing non-trivial formatting, then abstract out your directives and macros. Give them meaningful names.

That said, I actually agree with your points about LaTeX, and I gave up using it a long time ago. Plain TeX works exceptionally well, though. I even wrote a small and straightforward macro package for typesetting screenplays. It has a \direction macro, for typesetting script directions; a \speaker macro, for typesetting text spoken by a speaker; and a \scene macro for switching scenes. Aside from these directives, the entire script source is readable plain text.

yafujifide• 17 years ago

In principle, there could be a visual text editor that applied default styles to the structure of your text. You wouldn't see \jibber{jabber}, but text that was styled in a default way. Separately, custom styles could be applied to the output, say in a second window. This would allow you to separate the structure from the style without having to see the markup language, and it would be as easy to use as a WYSIWYG editor.

JulianMorrison2• 17 years ago

LaTeX has LyX, but of course it suffers from the "few templates" problem (made worse by the need for two templates - the original and the GUI rendering), and it isn't a wonderful text editor anyhow. But if you want to compose laTeX quickly, that's the tool.

tdoggette• 17 years ago

http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/wp.html#tth_sEc2.7

At this point, it becomes clear that this makes no damn sense at all for most people. Who wants to add steps to their writing process, add a delay between when they make a change and when they see it, and learn all new software to do it?

And then there's the remark about conserving disk space, which might have made sense in 1999, but it's a worthless consideration now.

elblanco2• 17 years ago

Disk space is virtually free today.

xtho2• 17 years ago

Ah, from 1999 when there were no converters for transforming more human ascii formats to latex with its funny error messages. Today I'm amazed why people still struggle with latex weird syntax when they could also use wiki-like markup languages.

fburnaby• 17 years ago

Perhaps MS word was worse 10 years ago. I think there is only one argument in the article that has stayed relevant, which is that word is a big complicated crash-prone program, whereas it's preferable to have a lightweight text editor. There are three possible required levels of expertise, depending on how important having a properly typeset document is: (1) using word (2) understanding TeX (3) understanding word.

If your document can be ugly, you can just open word and get cracking. The occasional weird formatting problems that show up in word aren't a huge deal. But if having a proper document is important, you need to either actually know latex or actually know word. Knowing latex is way easier than knowing how word works. MS made word easy to use by hiding all the gears. This is a problem when the gears don't work how you need them to (which sadly still happens too often).

The number of people for whom formatting matters this much is probably limited to publishers and academics, so I guess it probably doesn't matter much in general.

bediger• 17 years ago

A number of problems with "Word" exist. Actually, problems with "Word"'s choice of storage format exist.

1. No other program really, truly understands it, although large steps have been made in other "word processors".

2. Can't do a "diff" between versions.

These two factors mean that "Word" format is absolutely and truly useless for any kind of versioned text. Whether "gears" are visible or not doesn't come into it.

fallintothis• 17 years ago

I'm surprised there seems to be so much LaTeX hatred floating around the comments. I don't really know anything about typography, but typesetting my documents using markup is a pleasure. While I often fall into the trap of designing as I type, as soon as I get the styling right, it's consistent. Once I get BibTeX references to compile correctly, I can just \cite (even \possessivecite or \citeasnoun) and not have to worry about dangling bibliography sources that aren't used anywhere in the paper, citation style inconsistencies (where does the volume number go again?), making typos in separate references to the identical source, and so on. Did I change the order of some figures? \ref will still refer to the correct number. I could highlight some word and chord a shortcut to italicize something, then have the processor try to be smarter than me about what should and should not be italicized after that, etc. But I'd rather \emph a word and be done with it (and be able to do things like \usepackage{ulem} to change emphasis to underlines instead). Rather than tabbing back and forth to try to get the proper list structure when the processor gets confused about line breaks, I can textually mark where I want the list to begin/end, where it should nest, etc. Instead of wading through menus and searching for a picture of an A with an umlaut, I can just type H\"{a}agen-Dazs directly. I can do all of this in Vim, where I have productive text-editing commands and even spell-checking. Not to mention typesetting math!

The post's tone is objectionable, I suppose. I'm sure LaTeX is not for everyone. The learning curve's too high for your standard high-school kid writing an English paper, and the payoff is minimal in such cases since word processors have many of the same features for managing bibliographies, header formats, etc. But compared to just typing it in plain text, using a word processor feels horrifically obtuse to me.

delayclose5• 17 years ago

"Instead of wading through menus and searching for a picture of an A with an umlaut, I can just type H\"{a}agen-Dazs directly."

I just press the ä key.

gnosis• 17 years ago

You can do that with LaTeX too. It will take a bit of configuration first, but once you've got it configured you can type Unicode characters in to your source and have them interpreted as LaTeX commands.

marbletiles• 17 years ago

The model of the wysiwyg word processor is pretty much broken; but that doesn't mean that LaTeX or separate content/presentation is the answer for this problem set.

Instead, I think if more document processors took the approach of the early DTP apps, users would have a much easier time. Quark XPress 3.3 is an excellent model for how to do it: boxes, that you put on a page and then fill with text or pictures.

If you're just bashing out text, it can works largely as a word processor does today, just with one text box filling the page. But if you want to position or format things with any accuracy, you can manipulate them directly into boxes without the heartaches of doing so in any contemporary word processor.

It's a very simple conceptual model, easy to grasp and easier to use. I skipped both of my parents straight past word processors and after the vaguest of introductions to XPress they're now both producing complicated documents that are effectively impossible to create in Word.

Of course, something like XPress takes processing power, and it wasn't available in the early GUI days -- typing a document straight into XPress or Pagemaker was an exercise in frustration. So developers and users went down the "enhanced typewriter" route of MacWrite.

If we could start again, however, Mid-90s-style DTP would be the way to do it -- you don't need the complexity of something like InDesign: just a few simple tools and a floating palette for fonts and styles. Most of the common frustrations people have creating documents today would just vanish.

Apple has taken steps towards this model with Pages, but they haven't had the gumption to go the whole hog just yet, and what Word Processor DNA remains hampers it a bit. But it's going in the right direction.

bitwize• 17 years ago

Anybody else remember Ventura Publisher? An awesome publishing suite from Xerox that worked much like PageMaker or Quark, for DOS. Came with its own GEM runtime environment.

Awesome program. Cumbersome, but ungodly powerful in the right hands.

elblanco2• 17 years ago

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/publisher/default.aspx

GavinB• 17 years ago

Word Processors are stupid and inefficient, but the problems have nothing to do with including formatting options. For a one page business document, MS Word is just perfect. You need to be able to create the right formatting (bolds, headers, bullets, numbered lists) in order to get your point across at a skim.

For long documents, there is a big opening in the market.

An ideal word processor would have powerful features for organizational structure. This means drag and drop organization of chapters, subsections, and the ability to add meta-data to them—main characters, affected departments, whatever is appropriate. Color codes attached the the metadata would allow at-a-glance determinations of length, flow, etc. It would also be able to create visualizations of use of names and terms, and assess reading difficulty. The table of contents of your document should be a map that helps shape the work.

It would also need a context-sensitive thesaurus, powerful grammar tools, and revision control in the tradition of programming revision control. I should be able to cut a chapter and effortlessly bring it back in later in the manuscript two revisions later.

There are a few programs that attempt the basics of this for Mac, and nothing that I can find for Windows. Not including typesetting is just the beginning, and only necessary because it gets in the way of the rest.

sheena• 17 years ago

Yes, for all the emphasis about separating structure and style, I think the piece misses the bigger problem: the difficulty of changing that structure while you're writing. The author says "first one types one's text and gets its logical structure right" -- but isn't getting the logical structure right actually the crux of most writing efforts? This is quite apart from the typesetting or formatting of the end result. Most word processors fail at making restructuring simple, but it's not like plaintext fares any better, especially as your project gets longer and more complex.

That's where a tool like Scrivener or Ulysses comes in, one that gives you the ability to rearrange the constituent units of your piece (paragraphs, chapters, scenes, arguments, whatever) to shape and reshape the overarching structure and logical flow. (Besides, both Scrivener and Ulysses allow you to use markup and export to LaTeX, etc., so you're not necessarily losing out on the formatting benefits.)

stilus• 17 years ago

I am rather amazed nobody has mentioned LyX yet. Its "what you see is what you mean". You get the pointy-clickety GUI, all the tweaking possibilities you need, and you can still simply focus on content, ignoring the jibber{jabber} until you really need the ERT (evil red text). When it's time to layout, you let LaTeX do all the work.

http://www.lyx.org/Home

Kliment• 17 years ago

Well, the LaTeX approach is one extreme, the Word approach is the other extreme. Pretty much everything that somehow fits in between tends to be mostly one or the other. What's really missing is a plausible middle ground. What makes Word so attractive is that you can open it and start typing, and you can format things as you think of them. That sort of control feels nice. For LaTeX, what attracts me to it is being able to not care about format. Knowing this is someone else's problem feels nice. What's really missing is the middle ground. How about something where you type in text and format at will, then apply styles to (that actually work and make it look nice, unlike Word styles) and then apply tweaks to in word processor mode? And no, LyX doesn't do this. It does both sides of the divide badly. The closest I could think of is Scribus and the like, but those lose on the "just start typing" side of things.

Word Processors: Stupid and Inefficient

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