
The Future of the Word Processor (2016) - enkiv2
https://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-future-of-the-worlds-most-boring-software-the-word-processor
======
6stringmerc
Pretty fun article. I did a major Research Paper on slowing down the English
"writing process" on purpose to focus more on fundamentals (grammar, spelling)
without the assists of modern technology. Start with quill, eventually get to
typewriter.

Writing well takes active thought. That's why this quote is, to me, giggle
worthy:

> _" In 15 years I think the input interface and the idea of a 'document'
> [will] be entirely reimagined," Chen suggests. "I don't think we'll be at
> telepathy in that timeframe but I can see a lot more speech and audio
> playing a larger role for input. Video is already augmenting the document,
> but VR could be ubiquitous by then."_

Formal writing style - especially in long essays - is quite different than
spoken word cadences. Basically my point is people don't customarily speak
with the same discipline or rigor that they might put into writing. Tack on
the issue, in the US at least, of thick regional accents and I really, really
don't see Voice Input being the amazing game changer it can be advertised as
from time to time (see: Siri).

~~~
munificent
> Writing well takes active thought. That's why this quote is, to me, giggle
> worthy

Sure, but it's not clear that forcing all of that thought to happen _before
the first draft_ actually improves the final result. Many writers feel they
need to bang out a shitty first draft and that much of the magic happens in
later revisions.

> Tack on the issue, in the US at least, of thick regional accents and I
> really, really don't see Voice Input being the amazing game changer it can
> be advertised as from time to time

I often experience a funny phenomenon. A lot of times when I'm out for a walk
or a long drive, I'll start thinking about fiction ideas. Before too long, my
wandering mind drills down to what I think is an actual internal monologue of
prose. In my head, it flows smoothly and sounds compelling.

I always mean to start writing it down when I get home but never seem to find
the time or discipline or whatever to do so. Maybe already being in the middle
of a 200k-word nonfiction book has something to do with that...

What I've always wondered is if I am actually narrating real words or just
sort of imagining that I am in that way that it's always easier to imagine a
drawing than it is to draw it. The real experiment would be to get a recorder
and start dictating, but I never have. If I did, would that work?

If so, than it means I might "write" works in this way that for simple
practical reasons would never come about at all without the speech
recognition. Even if I were to summon the discipline to manually transcribe my
inner monologue, would something be lost in the translation? Or gained? Or
both?

~~~
daveguy
> Sure, but it's not clear that forcing all of that thought to happen before
> the first draft actually improves the final result.

To that point, the essay "Shitty First Drafts" by Anne Lamott, 1954 is a great
essay on the importance of shitty first drafts.

[https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://wrd.as.uky.edu/sites/default/files/1-Shitty%2520First%2520Drafts.pdf&ved=0ahUKEwiW94OE1bDUAhVJZCYKHRoTCAcQFggcMAA&usg=AFQjCNGlcIq4WcGVSvQTDm_U0zwBjJ31QQ)

~~~
jmkb
For anyone doing a double-take on the essay's title being outlandish for 1954,
that's her year of birth and this essay is an excerpt from her 1994 book _Bird
by Bird_.

------
derefr
"Word processors" were always a stilted compromise; they try to weave together
the acts of composition and layout, when each necessarily constrains the
other. As you compose a document in a word processor, you end up "fighting
yourself"—making changes on the composition side that require matching changes
on the layout side, or vice-versa. And not only this, the two tasks are
mutually _distracting_ —fiddling with layout after writing a single sentence
can be used as a means of procrastinating from writing the next sentence; and
endless copyediting can be used as a distraction from deciding on layout. A
program that functions to do both tasks concurrently, is often far _less_ than
the sum of its parts, in productivity terms.

Everything is much simplified if you just avoid this weaving altogether, and
adopt a content _pipeline_ approach, as every commercial book publisher,
newspaper and magazine does. In this approach, you use pure-composition
programs for your composition, and pure-layout programs for your layout. When
you are working on one, you are not distracted with the demands of the other.

In fact, two different people can be working asynchronously on these two
components; and, indeed, if the work of one stage is finished first, this
enables an extremely useful _static_ constraint on the work of the other,
simplifying the decision-making for it greatly. Layout can determine target
word-count; or word-count and paragraph composition can decide layout.

What you _don 't_ have is the constant tweaking, pitting half-finished layout
and half-finished prose against one-another. Each is effectively opaque to the
other until the end of the process.

The most wonderful thing that has happened to composition in recent memory is
the GUI Markdown editor. Until these, all composition programs that weren't
simply plaintext, had at least some layout elements. (This is because their
target format was RTF, and RTF contains things like per-line margin settings.)
But .md is a fine format for storing compositions: it lets you specify the
"tone" of text with markup, but contains no mechanism to (reliably) specify
final appearance.

Combine such documents with a program like Publisher or InDesign (or,
partially, LyX or Pages) for layout, and you've got a very nice workflow. And,
as a side-benefit, the prose created during the composition step will be
exactly what is needed for web publishing as well.

~~~
accordionclown
> adopt a content pipeline approach, as every commercial book publisher,
> newspaper and magazine does

the main reason they do it that way is because they have different people
doing the writing and the layout tasks.

but the writers of today and tomorrow are much more likely to be self-
publishers, who are pricing their work such that they don't have the margin to
employ others to do layout.

now, it's true that some people are incapable of doing both tasks at once, and
find themselves procrastinating by doing one task when they should be doing
the other.

those people will have to learn how to fix that bad habit.

but it is equally true that other people are quite capable of doing both tasks
at the same time, and they'll typically do the complete job in much faster
time doing both at once.

and they often end up doing a much better job too, because they're working
with a tight feedback loop between the tasks.

now, i do agree with you that a light-markup editor can enhance such a
feedback loop. a 2-pane setup, a la the ghost interface, requires the entry of
clean text and couples it with a display that lets a writer confirm they will
get the output they want.

(indesign is outdated. if you need a .pdf today, repurpose your .html using
prince, renting it on a monthly basis via docraptor. that way, a single input
creates .html, .epub, .mobi, and .pdf.)

~~~
derefr
> those people will have to learn how to fix that bad habit.

You realize that I'm not talking about a problem that you either have or you
don't, but one that everyone has _to some degree_ , right? Anything that's a
matter of willpower, some people will have less of; and, in fact, everyone
will have less of as things happen to them that deplete their willpower
throughout the day. Consider the needs of "you at 4:30PM on a Friday"—they
find it much harder than you do to be productive, right? Well, that's why
things like distractionless editors exist. So motivated-you can make a choice
(use a spartan editor) that boxes unmotivated-you into having nothing else to
do but work.

> and they often end up doing a much better job too, because they're working
> with a tight feedback loop between the tasks.

I do agree with this. But keep in mind that you don't need any special kind of
program to accomplish this. You can have your (auto-reloading-text-boxes)
layout program open in one window, and your (auto-saving) composition program
open in the other, maybe across two monitors. Works just as well, and—unlike a
"composition with preview" style editor—the "preview" pane is instead a real
WYSIWYG editor for the layout and typography, as well as showing the state of
your composition.

> indesign is outdated

Yeah, true. It's better to have a format that actually produces digital-native
results as well. It's (sadly) not usually feasible in large orgs, given that
there are separate teams with separate skillsets that want to take one
composition as input and run it through two separate (web and desktop)
publishing pipelines. Even if you can align them all on the same software,
attempting to do any "layout rule-sharing" is a lot like trying to get the
mobile and desktop frontends of an app to share code.

> repurpose your .html

That's one (valid) approach, sure. The other one (that I personally favor) is
to start with the print layout, in a desktop publishing program that happens
to use a layout format that is a superset of HTML+CSS, which gives you the
ability to add CSS media queries to said document to specify how it should
render when exported as an ePub or as HTML.

One example of such a digital-native desktop publishing program is iBooks
Author. You get a proprietary, fixed-layout "rich eBook" format from it by
default; it exports to PDF at full fidelity (though you lose some TOC
metadata); but it also exports to ePub and HTML.

It's honestly a shame that the EPUB 3.0 standard hasn't seen traction or
gotten an equivalent authoring experience from anyone, because it's basically
the same idea but not proprietary. It's a perfect "mother format" to reduce
down to assets for every kind of content channel you'd care to use.

~~~
accordionclown
> You realize that I'm not talking about a problem that you either have or you
> don't, but one that everyone has to some degree, right?

i don't see it that way. i especially don't see it as involving "willpower". i
see it more as a specific skill.

now, as i said quite clearly, some people lack the skill. and some of those
people will be totally unable to learn it. the most unfortunate ones should
adopt your 2-stage workflow.

but most people can learn to drop the procrastination habit and pick up the
skill of simultaneous writing and layout.

plus, on the other side, some people thrive on that method. not just do they
not "have a problem" with it, to any degree, but they actually perform better
when they work in that way.

> It's (sadly) not usually feasible in large orgs, given that there are
> separate teams with separate skillsets

i agree that such organizations won't change their workflow.

but i'm not really all that interested in empowering _them_.

> iBooks Author

> It's honestly a shame that the EPUB 3.0 standard

it's much better if i don't get started on either of those topics... :+)

------
z1mm32m4n
There are a couple things that all these "death to word processors" articles
overlook:

1\. Stickiness.

Google Docs (and even Microsoft Word) work so well when you use them in
conjunction with their respective ecosystem. Many users choose Google Docs
over Dropbox Paper simply because they already have Google Apps accounts, even
though _as a product_ what they really want is something more like Dropbox
Paper.

Inevitably, what happens is that those who can try out a new product on a
small team do so, but those who are forced to work between teams or even
between companies choose the solution they're already using; i.e., the
stickiest.

2\. Plain text is powerful

I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir here, but each new "office productivity"
or "word processor replacement" tool comes with it's own silo. Even Microsoft
Word, which has it's own file type that you can save to your Desktop, is
largely a proprietary format. You can _export_ data out of Google Docs or
Dropbox Paper, etc., but the idea is that you're leaving the promised land.
You're packing up and moving somewhere else.

On the other hand, we know from the Unix philosophy that plain text is a
universal interface. Using plain text can help us escape these siloes. The
problem, of course, is that from grade school we teach students that to edit
text we use Microsoft Word.

There are a lot of cool new _products_ in this design space of "word processor
replacements," but few which tackle these two fundamental issues.

~~~
emodendroket
Plain text is "powerful" in some ways, but supporting links, styles, a
bibliography, and even embedded scripts, in the way Word does, is not a power
it has.

~~~
uberchet
Well, it kinda depends on what you mean by "plain text" and what you mean by
"support." You can get a lot of these things through text-markup systems like
Markdown.

There's a growing class of editors that strive to provide a richer document
experience while still relying on plain text as the file format. I don't
usually suggest normal people adopt it, but an example of this kind of hybrid
approach is Orgmode in emacs. I can do ALL SORTS OF THINGS with my org files,
but the actual data is still just plaintext with minimal and human-readable
markup. The editor does the rest of the work.

I find that promising.

~~~
emodendroket
If you mean "it's technically text but you have to have a program that knows
how to parse it" then it's not really much of an advantage over docx having
zipped XML.

There was an (astute, I think) article from "Joel on Software" years ago
saying that the main reason that supporting the Word format was hard was that,
by implication, you needed to implement every feature Word had to do it right.

~~~
accordionclown
> it's not really much of an advantage over docx having zipped XML.

a plain-text light-markup file -- easily read, parsed, and rewritten when
necessary by a plethora of apps (text-editors, spell-checkers, grammar-
checkers, link-checkers, sanitizers, validators, on and on) -- is a big
advantage (gargantuan!) over a complex xml-format document stored in a .zip
container.

and editing and ease-of-use (and re-use and repurposability) is much
friendlier as well.

~~~
emodendroket
By definition any sort of "light" markup is going to mean you can't support
anywhere near as many features as Word does.

~~~
accordionclown
that's absolutely the case, yes.

light-markup will never do everything ms-word does.

nor should it.

but typical light-markup systems these days handle all of the features needed
for the vast majority of long-form documents which are now being produced --
books, annual reports, scientific articles, etc. -- and do it with an eye
toward mounting on the web.

whereas ms-word is still stuck in a page mentality, and creates .html output
which is rather horrendous.

but i agree that ms-word is still valuable to many.

and i no longer feel it necessary to bludgeon word for being the "de facto
default" out in the world, where everybody uses it because everybody uses it,
and nobody can use anything else because "conform".

so if someone needs one of the "does more" things where ms-word does more, i'm
glad they have word. it's a tool in their chest, no reason to begrudge. i'm
happy, even, that word has true fans like you.

i'm also glad the rest of us can move on now to something that we think is
better. it's about time.

------
plg
I'm an academic. If there was something that was:

1\. not siloed in a binary format, i.e. could export to a plaintext-ish format

2\. had a gui for those who want it

3\. had seamless citation/bibliography tools, e.g. based on Citation Style
Language (CSL) & web lookup e.g. on Google Scholar & PubMed

4\. had seamless integration for Figures + numbering/captioning, Tables +
numbering/captioning

I would pay lotsa $$ for it

I know LaTeX tools and/or pandoc tools can accomplish this but they are not
user friendly enough

~~~
hsitz
Except for the gui (by which I assume you mean wysiwyg) Emacs with Org-mode
meets these requirements, albeit requires a bit of configuring and a couple
add-ons. It takes a bit of learning, though, and wouldn't meet a user-friendly
requirement. Org-mode does meet a few wysiwyg items (font size, underlining,
italics, etc.) but certainly isn't full wysiwyg solution. Still, it's probably
a better solution than LaTeX, because (1) Org documents can be seamlessly
exported to LaTeX (and many other formats), (2) Org documents tend to have
much cleaner (or even no markup) compared to LaTeX, and (3) add-ons extending
functionality can be easily crafted in Emacs.

~~~
hsitz
To get an idea of what you can do in Orgmode, a good place to check is the
books/publications linked on John Kitchin's page. He's a professor of
chemistry who uses Orgmode for lots of different things. Among other things
(and also listed on the linked page), he is the author of the org-ref
extension that integrates citations and referencing into Orgmode, using the
bibtex database:

[http://kitchingroup.cheme.cmu.edu/blog/2014/08/08/What-we-
ar...](http://kitchingroup.cheme.cmu.edu/blog/2014/08/08/What-we-are-using-
org-mode-for/)

Here is a youtube video demonstrating use of the org-ref extension for
citations and references:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyvpSVl4_dg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyvpSVl4_dg)

~~~
uberchet
Thanks for this.

------
uberchet
That's interesting, but I think the author misses the fact that lots of
writing is still done with the page in mind.

That said, I absolutely do composition in tools other than Word most of the
time unless I know I'm writing for print or a print-analogue (we deliver lots
of work product as PDF, which may as well be printed).

What I care more about than print or nonprint, though, is file format
longevity, which is why most of what I do is in plain text. That's an
orthogonal concern to the issues of the piece, but it still bears discussion
given how much data over time has been lost in orphaned formats.

------
emodendroket
Word processors actually do quite a lot. Word is host to multiple scripting
environments and can do all kinds of useful stuff (the "useless bloat" you're
always hearing about).

~~~
uberchet
It still shocks me how many folks absolutely ignore the features of Word that
make it powerful. A huge one is styles.

Before we had semantic markup on the Web, Word was doing something similar
with meaningful styles that could drive document structure and whatnot. It's
astonishing how often I see people either manually format headings (like,
referencing a postit that says "heading: bold, 14pt") or use unstructured
styles instead of the actual heading options.

Word will give you a document outline in a "slide out" window that populates
based on your headings. It can be HUGELY USEFUL when you're building a longer,
more intricate document, and yet it's rarely used properly. It's baffling.

~~~
emodendroket
I understand why people don't use it correctly -- it requires a deeper level
of knowledge, after all -- but I don't understand why I constantly see people
in technical forums claiming it doesn't support such a thing.

~~~
uberchet
I could be flip and say "because Microsoft," but there's probably some truth
there. Lots of very technical people reject MSFT out of hand, and for a long
time it was pretty easy to understand why, but Word has always been very, very
capable.

The first time I used semantic style structure in a Word doc was in Word for
_DOS_ in about 1992.

------
GnarfGnarf
Nice demo. I wonder if it handles tables, images. How is the document stored?
Can it import text-based formatted files (eg: RTF)? Is there a Windows
version?

------
qrbLPHiKpiux
Focus on the text first -> plain text, Markdown.

Then copy/paste into word, or preferably something else for formatting.

Too many distractions in a modern word processor.

~~~
emodendroket
"Distractions" of course meaning "features I, personally, have not had
occasion to use" in this case.

------
Upvoter33
Article doesn't discuss LaTeX enough - skip. :)

~~~
analog31
Or Jupyter. I've gotten to the point where I can't use a text editor unless
it's capable of computation.

