

Word Processors: Stupid and Inefficient - b-man
http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/wp.html

======
fallintothis
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.

~~~
delayclose
"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
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.

------
tylero
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?

------
JulianMorrison
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.

~~~
yafujifide
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.

~~~
JulianMorrison
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.

------
misuba
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.

------
GavinB
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
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.)

------
swannodette
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.

------
gacek
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.

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

~~~
macmac
I realize that. I used a business memo as an example of a mainstream document
type, not as a ref to "business".

------
bonaldi
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
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.

------
wallflower

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

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

------
j_baker
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.

~~~
swannodette
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.

~~~
delayclose
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).

~~~
swannodette
Styling your text has absolutely nothing to with writing. Consider that if
you're writing with pen and paper you're not styling your text, you're just
writing. A good writing tool should facilitate focusing on writing (no
distractions) and augment the organization of your writing- that's about it.

Presentation is a whole other step that you get to when you've actually
written something worth reading.

~~~
delayclose
I don't see how adding a predefined style called "level 2 heading" to
paragraph would be more distracting than adding a "/this is a level 2 heading"
TeX command.

That said, I think having a catalogue of suitable elements for each context
and a (modifiable) document structure tree is better than either of the above
alternatives.

------
lmkg
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
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._

~~~
delayclose
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?

------
stilus
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>

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

There is no good reason to compromise nowadays.

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

~~~
amichail
It's great for math/science writing.

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

------
Kliment
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.

------
derefr
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_.

------
scottw
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.

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

------
tdoggette
<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.

~~~
elblanco
Disk space is virtually free today.

------
fburnaby
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
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.

------
lazyant
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
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.

~~~
lazyant
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.

------
xtho
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.

------
rayval
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.

