

Why you should never write a book in .doc - Swizec
http://swizec.com/blog/why-you-should-never-write-a-book-in-doc/swizec/6333

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ScottWhigham
_Wait … no it isn’t. In fact Word sucks at all of that!_

You would assume that the writer would then tell you which tools do those
tasks better. If he says that in this post, I couldn't find it. I did find him
saying that "LibreOffice isn’t bad per se, but there are better writing tools
out there." I read through his suggested "better" writing tools and the first
one he likes better is a writing tool that only works on Macs/iOS and the
other is a WordPress plugin. Weird suggestions.

Suggestion: save your time and read something else. There's nothing more than
a Mac user's opinion going on here. As a 15+ year author, I've used .doc
probably 90% of the time and it's worked, as it does for nearly every major
publisher in the past ten years. There - that's my opinion. I just expressed
it more succinctly.

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aaronsnoswell
Hi Scott - was sent here by another HN user - As an author I'd love to hear
any feedback that you've got regrading my thread I just started:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6373031](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6373031)

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pmelendez
I agree that .doc (or .docx) is not the right tool for writing a book.

But the title would be more appropriate as "Why you should never write a book
in .doc *in Libre Office". All his complains are inexact or just not true in
Word.

I was expecting more insights about the format itself and not about his
experience related to the use of .doc in Libre Office (which by the way, also
crash in my wife's mac book pro).

~~~
Swizec
Well that's actually one of the main problems isn't it? Unless you're a
windows user, .doc just doesn't work very well. Text based formats do.

~~~
pmelendez
AFAIK .docx is a text based format compressed using zip.

